homework language of origin

History Cooperative

The Homework Dilemma: Who Invented Homework?

The inventor of homework may be unknown, but its evolution reflects contributions from educators, philosophers, and students. Homework reinforces learning, fosters discipline, and prepares students for the future, spanning from ancient civilizations to modern education. Ongoing debates probe its balance, efficacy, equity, and accessibility, prompting innovative alternatives like project-based and personalized learning. As education evolves, the enigma of homework endures.

Table of Contents

Who Invented Homework?

While historical records don’t provide a definitive answer regarding the inventor of homework in the modern sense, two prominent figures, Roberto Nevelis of Venice and Horace Mann, are often linked to the concept’s early development.

Roberto Nevelis of Venice: A Mythical Innovator?

Roberto Nevelis, a Venetian educator from the 16th century, is frequently credited with the invention of homework. The story goes that Nevelis assigned tasks to his students outside regular classroom hours to reinforce their learning—a practice that aligns with the essence of homework. However, the historical evidence supporting Nevelis as the inventor of homework is rather elusive, leaving room for skepticism.

While Nevelis’s role remains somewhat mythical, his association with homework highlights the early recognition of the concept’s educational value.

Horace Mann: Shaping the American Educational Landscape

Horace Mann, often regarded as the “Father of American Education,” made significant contributions to the American public school system in the 19th century. Though he may not have single-handedly invented homework, his educational reforms played a crucial role in its widespread adoption.

Mann’s vision for education emphasized discipline and rigor, which included assigning tasks to be completed outside of the classroom. While he did not create homework in the traditional sense, his influence on the American education system paved the way for its integration.

The invention of homework was driven by several educational objectives. It aimed to reinforce classroom learning, ensuring knowledge retention and skill development. Homework also served as a means to promote self-discipline and responsibility among students, fostering valuable study habits and time management skills.

Why Was Homework Invented?

The invention of homework was not a random educational practice but rather a deliberate strategy with several essential objectives in mind.

Reinforcing Classroom Learning

Foremost among these objectives was the need to reinforce classroom learning. When students leave the classroom, the goal is for them to retain and apply the knowledge they have acquired during their lessons. Homework emerged as a powerful tool for achieving this goal. It provided students with a structured platform to revisit the day’s lessons, practice what they had learned, and solidify their understanding.

Homework assignments often mirrored classroom activities, allowing students to extend their learning beyond the confines of school hours. Through the repetition of exercises and tasks related to the curriculum, students could deepen their comprehension and mastery of various subjects.

Fostering Self-Discipline and Responsibility

Another significant objective behind the creation of homework was the promotion of self-discipline and responsibility among students. Education has always been about more than just the acquisition of knowledge; it also involves the development of life skills and habits that prepare individuals for future challenges.

By assigning tasks to be completed independently at home, educators aimed to instill valuable study habits and time management skills. Students were expected to take ownership of their learning, manage their time effectively, and meet deadlines—a set of skills that have enduring relevance in contemporary education and beyond.

Homework encouraged students to become proactive in their educational journey. It taught them the importance of accountability and the satisfaction of completing tasks on their own. These life skills would prove invaluable in their future endeavors, both academically and in the broader context of their lives.

When Was Homework Invented?

The roots of homework stretch deep into the annals of history, tracing its origins to ancient civilizations and early educational practices. While it has undergone significant evolution over the centuries, the concept of extending learning beyond the classroom has always been an integral part of education.

Earliest Origins of Homework and Early Educational Practices

The idea of homework, in its most rudimentary form, can be traced back to the earliest human civilizations. In ancient Egypt , for instance, students were tasked with hieroglyphic writing exercises. These exercises served as a precursor to modern homework, as they required students to practice and reinforce their understanding of written language—an essential skill for communication and record-keeping in that era.

In ancient Greece , luminaries like Plato and Aristotle advocated for the use of written exercises as a tool for intellectual development. They recognized the value of practice in enhancing one’s knowledge and skills, laying the foundation for a more systematic approach to homework.

The ancient Romans also played a pivotal role in the early development of homework. Young Roman students were expected to complete assignments at home, with a particular focus on subjects like mathematics and literature. These assignments were designed to consolidate their classroom learning, emphasizing the importance of practice in mastering various disciplines.

READ MORE: Who Invented Math? The History of Mathematics

The practice of assigning work to be done outside of regular school hours continued to evolve through various historical periods. As societies advanced, so did the complexity and diversity of homework tasks, reflecting the changing needs and priorities of education.

The Influence of Educational Philosophers

While the roots of homework extend to ancient times, the ideas of renowned educational philosophers in later centuries further contributed to its development. John Locke, an influential thinker of the Enlightenment era, believed in a gradual and cumulative approach to learning. He emphasized the importance of students revisiting topics through repetition and practice, a concept that aligns with the principles of homework.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another prominent philosopher, stressed the significance of self-directed learning. Rousseau’s ideas encouraged the development of independent study habits and a personalized approach to education—a philosophy that resonates with modern concepts of homework.

Homework in the American Public School System

The American public school system has played a pivotal role in the widespread adoption and popularization of homework. To understand the significance of homework in modern education, it’s essential to delve into its history and evolution within the United States.

History and Evolution of Homework in the United States

The late 19th century marked a significant turning point for homework in the United States. During this period, influenced by educational reforms and the growing need for standardized curricula, homework assignments began to gain prominence in American schools.

Educational reformers and policymakers recognized the value of homework as a tool for reinforcing classroom learning. They believed that assigning tasks for students to complete outside of regular school hours would help ensure that knowledge was retained and skills were honed. This approach aligned with the broader trends in education at the time, which aimed to provide a more structured and systematic approach to learning.

As the American public school system continued to evolve, homework assignments became a common practice in classrooms across the nation. The standardization of curricula and the formalization of education contributed to the integration of homework into the learning process. This marked a significant departure from earlier educational practices, reflecting a shift toward more structured and comprehensive learning experiences.

The incorporation of homework into the American education system not only reinforced classroom learning but also fostered self-discipline and responsibility among students. It encouraged them to take ownership of their educational journey and develop valuable study habits and time management skills—a legacy that continues to influence modern pedagogy.

Controversies Around Homework

Despite its longstanding presence in education, homework has not been immune to controversy and debate. While many view it as a valuable educational tool, others question its effectiveness and impact on students’ well-being.

The Homework Debate

One of the central controversies revolves around the amount of homework assigned to students. Critics argue that excessive homework loads can lead to stress, sleep deprivation, and a lack of free time for students. The debate often centers on striking the right balance between homework and other aspects of a student’s life, including extracurricular activities, family time, and rest.

Homework’s Efficacy

Another contentious issue pertains to the efficacy of homework in enhancing learning outcomes. Some studies suggest that moderate amounts of homework can reinforce classroom learning and improve academic performance. However, others question whether all homework assignments contribute equally to learning or whether some may be more beneficial than others. The effectiveness of homework can vary depending on factors such as the student’s grade level, the subject matter, and the quality of the assignment.

Equity and Accessibility

Homework can also raise concerns related to equity and accessibility. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds may have limited access to resources and support at home, potentially putting them at a disadvantage when it comes to completing homework assignments. This disparity has prompted discussions about the role of homework in perpetuating educational inequalities and how schools can address these disparities.

Alternative Approaches to Learning

In response to the controversies surrounding homework, educators and researchers have explored alternative approaches to learning. These approaches aim to strike a balance between reinforcing classroom learning and promoting holistic student well-being. Some alternatives include:

Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning emphasizes hands-on, collaborative projects that allow students to apply their knowledge to real-world problems. This approach shifts the focus from traditional homework assignments to engaging, practical learning experiences.

Flipped Classrooms

Flipped classrooms reverse the traditional teaching model. Students learn new material at home through video lectures or readings and then use class time for interactive discussions and activities. This approach reduces the need for traditional homework while promoting active learning.

Personalized Learning

Personalized learning tailors instruction to individual students’ needs, allowing them to progress at their own pace. This approach minimizes the need for one-size-fits-all homework assignments and instead focuses on targeted learning experiences.

The Ongoing Conversation

The controversies surrounding homework highlight the need for an ongoing conversation about its role in education. Striking the right balance between reinforcing learning and addressing students’ well-being remains a complex challenge. As educators, parents, and researchers continue to explore innovative approaches to learning, the role of homework in the modern educational landscape continues to evolve. Ultimately, the goal is to provide students with the most effective and equitable learning experiences possible.

Unpacking the Homework Enigma

Homework, without a single inventor, has evolved through educators, philosophers, and students. It reinforces learning, fosters discipline and prepares students. From ancient times to modern education, it upholds timeless values. Yet, controversies arise—debates on balance, efficacy, equity, and accessibility persist. Innovative alternatives like project-based and personalized learning emerge. Homework’s role evolves with education.

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The Surprising History of Homework Reform

Really, kids, there was a time when lots of grownups thought homework was bad for you.

Homework causes a lot of fights. Between parents and kids, sure. But also, as education scholar Brian Gill and historian Steven Schlossman write, among U.S. educators. For more than a century, they’ve been debating how, and whether, kids should do schoolwork at home .

At the dawn of the twentieth century, homework meant memorizing lists of facts which could then be recited to the teacher the next day. The rising progressive education movement despised that approach. These educators advocated classrooms free from recitation. Instead, they wanted students to learn by doing. To most, homework had no place in this sort of system.

Through the middle of the century, Gill and Schlossman write, this seemed like common sense to most progressives. And they got their way in many schools—at least at the elementary level. Many districts abolished homework for K–6 classes, and almost all of them eliminated it for students below fourth grade.

By the 1950s, many educators roundly condemned drills, like practicing spelling words and arithmetic problems. In 1963, Helen Heffernan, chief of California’s Bureau of Elementary Education, definitively stated that “No teacher aware of recent theories could advocate such meaningless homework assignments as pages of repetitive computation in arithmetic. Such an assignment not only kills time but kills the child’s creative urge to intellectual activity.”

But, the authors note, not all reformers wanted to eliminate homework entirely. Some educators reconfigured the concept, suggesting supplemental reading or having students do projects based in their own interests. One teacher proposed “homework” consisting of after-school “field trips to the woods, factories, museums, libraries, art galleries.” In 1937, Carleton Washburne, an influential educator who was the superintendent of the Winnetka, Illinois, schools, proposed a homework regimen of “cooking and sewing…meal planning…budgeting, home repairs, interior decorating, and family relationships.”

Another reformer explained that “at first homework had as its purpose one thing—to prepare the next day’s lessons. Its purpose now is to prepare the children for fuller living through a new type of creative and recreational homework.”

That idea didn’t necessarily appeal to all educators. But moderation in the use of traditional homework became the norm.

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“Virtually all commentators on homework in the postwar years would have agreed with the sentiment expressed in the NEA Journal in 1952 that ‘it would be absurd to demand homework in the first grade or to denounce it as useless in the eighth grade and in high school,’” Gill and Schlossman write.

That remained more or less true until 1983, when publication of the landmark government report A Nation at Risk helped jump-start a conservative “back to basics” agenda, including an emphasis on drill-style homework. In the decades since, continuing “reforms” like high-stakes testing, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Common Core standards have kept pressure on schools. Which is why twenty-first-century first graders get spelling words and pages of arithmetic.

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The History of Homework: Why Was it Invented and Who Was Behind It?

• By Emily Summers
• February 14, 2020

Homework is long-standing education staple, one that many students hate with a fiery passion. We can’t really blame them, especially if it’s a primary source of stress that can result in headaches, exhaustion, and lack of sleep.

It’s not uncommon for students, parents, and even some teachers to complain about bringing assignments home. Yet, for millions of children around the world, homework is still a huge part of their daily lives as students — even if it continues to be one of their biggest causes of stress and unrest.

It makes one wonder, who in their right mind would invent such a thing as homework?

Who Invented Homework?

Pliny the younger: when in ancient rome, horace mann: the father of modern homework, the history of homework in america, 1900s: anti-homework sentiment & homework bans, 1930: homework as child labor, early-to-mid 20th century: homework and the progressive era, the cold war: homework starts heating up, 1980s: homework in a nation at risk, early 21 st century, state of homework today: why is it being questioned, should students get homework pros of cons of bringing school work home.

Online, there are many articles that point to Roberto Nevilis as the first educator to give his students homework. He created it as a way to punish his lazy students and ensure that they fully learned their lessons. However, these pieces of information mostly come from obscure educational blogs or forum websites with questionable claims. No credible news source or website has ever mentioned the name Roberto Nevilis as the person who invented homework . In fact, it’s possible that Nevilis never even existed.

As we’re not entirely sure who to credit for creating the bane of students’ existence and the reasons why homework was invented, we can use a few historical trivia to help narrow down our search.

Mentions of the term “homework” date back to as early as ancient Rome. In I century AD, Pliny the Younger , an oratory teacher, supposedly invented homework by asking his followers to practice public speaking at home. It was to help them become more confident and fluent in their speeches. But some would argue that the assignment wasn’t exactly the type of written work that students have to do at home nowadays. Only introverted individuals with a fear of public speaking would find it difficult and stressful.

It’s also safe to argue that since homework is an integral part of education, it’s probable that it has existed since the dawn of learning, like a beacon of light to all those helpless and lost (or to cast darkness on those who despise it). This means that Romans, Enlightenment philosophers, and Middle Age monks all read, memorized, and sang pieces well before homework was given any definition. It’s harder to play the blame game this way unless you want to point your finger at Horace Mann.

In the 19 th century, Horace Mann , a politician and educational reformer had a strong interest in the compulsory public education system of Germany as a newly unified nation-state. Pupils attending the Volksschulen or “People’s Schools” were given mandatory assignments that they needed to complete at home during their own time. This requirement emphasized the state’s power over individuals at a time when nationalists such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte were rallying support for a unified German state. Basically, the state used homework as an element of power play.

Despite its political origins, the system of bringing school assignments home spread across Europe and eventually found their way to Horace Mann, who was in Prussia at that time. He brought the system home with him to America where homework became a daily activity in the lives of students.

Despite homework being a near-universal part of the American educational experience today, it hasn’t always been universally accepted. Take a look at its turbulent history in America.

In 1901, just a few decades after Horace Mann introduced the concept to Americans, homework was banned in the Pacific state of California . The ban affected students younger than 15 years old and stayed in effect until 1917.

Around the same time, prominent publications such as The New York Times and Ladies’ Home Journal published statements from medical professionals and parents who stated that homework was detrimental to children’s health.

In 1930, the American Child Health Association declared homework as a type of child labor . Since laws against child labor had been passed recently during that time, the proclamation painted homework as unacceptable educational practice, making everyone wonder why homework was invented in the first place.

However, it’s keen to note that one of the reasons why homework was so frowned upon was because children were needed to help out with household chores (a.k.a. a less intensive and more socially acceptable form of child labor).

During the progressive education reforms of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, educators started looking for ways to make homework assignments more personal and relevant to the interests of individual students. Maybe this was how immortal essay topics such as “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” and “What I Did During My Summer Vacation” were born.

After World War II, the Cold War heated up rivalries between the U.S. and Russia. Sputnik 1’s launch in 1957 intensified the competition between Americans and Russians – including their youth.

Education authorities in the U.S. decided that implementing rigorous homework to American students of all ages was the best way to ensure that they were always one step ahead of their Russian counterparts, especially in the competitive fields of Math and Science.

In 1986, the U.S. Department of Education’s pamphlet, “What Works,” included homework as one of the effective strategies to boost the quality of education. This came three years after the National Commission on Excellence in Education published “ Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform .” The landmark report lambasted the state of America’s schools, calling for reforms to right the alarming direction that public education was headed.

Today, many educators, students, parents, and other concerned citizens have once again started questioning why homework was invented and if it’s still valuable.

Homework now is facing major backlash around the world. With more than 60% of high school and college students seeking counselling for conditions such as clinical depression and anxiety, all of which are brought about by school, it’s safe to say that American students are more stressed out than they should be.

After sitting through hours at school, they leave only to start on a mountain pile of homework. Not only does it take up a large chunk of time that they can otherwise spend on their hobbies and interests, it also stops them from getting enough sleep. This can lead to students experiencing physical health problems, a lack of balance in their lives, and alienation from their peers and society in general.

Is homework important and necessary ? Or is it doing more harm than good? Here some key advantages and disadvantages to consider.

• It encourages the discipline of practice

Using the same formula or memorizing the same information over and over can be difficult and boring, but it reinforces the practice of discipline. To master a skill, repetition is often needed. By completing homework every night, specifically with difficult subjects, the concepts become easier to understand, helping students polish their skills and achieve their life goals.

• It teaches students to manage their time

Homework goes beyond just completing tasks. It encourages children to develop their skills in time management as schedules need to be organized to ensure that all tasks can be completed within the day.

• It provides more time for students to complete their learning process

The time allotted for each subject in school is often limited to 1 hour or less per day. That’s not enough time for students to grasp the material and core concepts of each subject. By creating specific homework assignments, it becomes possible for students to make up for the deficiencies in time.

• It discourages creative endeavors

If a student spends 3-5 hours a day on homework, those are 3-5 hours that they can’t use to pursue creative passions. Students might like to read leisurely or take up new hobbies but homework takes away their time from painting, learning an instrument, or developing new skills.

• Homework is typically geared toward benchmarks

Teachers often assign homework to improve students’ test scores. Although this can result in positive outcomes such as better study habits, the fact is that when students feel tired, they won’t likely absorb as much information. Their stress levels will go up and they’ll feel the curriculum burnout.

• No evidence that homework creates improvements

Research shows that homework doesn’t improve academic performance ; it can even make it worse. Homework creates a negative attitude towards schooling and education, making students dread going to their classes. If they don’t like attending their lessons, they will be unmotivated to listen to the discussions.

With all of the struggles that students face each day due to homework, it’s puzzling to understand why it was even invented. However, whether you think it’s helpful or not, just because the concept has survived for centuries doesn’t mean that it has to stay within the educational system.

Not all students care about the history of homework, but they all do care about the future of their educational pursuits. Maybe one day, homework will be fully removed from the curriculum of schools all over the world but until that day comes, students will have to burn the midnight oil to pass their requirements on time and hopefully achieve their own versions of success.

About the Author

Emily summers.

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Who Invented Homework? A Big Question Answered with Facts

Crystal Bourque

Delving into the intriguing history of education, one of the most pondered questions arises: Who invented homework?

Love it or hate it, homework is part of student life.

But what’s the purpose of completing these tasks and assignments? And who would create an education system that makes students complete work outside the classroom?

This post contains everything you’ve ever wanted to know about homework. So keep reading! You’ll discover the answer to the big question: who invented homework?

Who Invented Homework?

The myth of roberto nevilis: who is he, the origins of homework, a history of homework in the united states, 5 facts about homework, types of homework.

• What’s the Purpose of Homework? 
• Homework Pros
• Homework Cons

When, How, and Why was Homework Invented?

Daniel Jedzura/Shutterstock.com

To ensure we cover the basics (and more), let’s explore when, how, and why was homework invented.

As a bonus, we’ll also cover who invented homework. So get ready because the answer might surprise you!

It’s challenging to pinpoint the exact person responsible for the invention of homework.

For example, Medieval Monks would work on memorization and practice singing. Ancient philosophers would read and develop their teachings outside the classroom. While this might not sound like homework in the traditional form we know today, one could argue that these methods helped to form the basic structure and format.

So let’s turn to recorded history to try and identify who invented homework and when homework was invented.

Pliny the Younger

Credit: laphamsquarterly.org

Mention of homework appears in the writings of Pliny the Younger, meaning we can trace the term ‘homework’ back to ancient Rome. Pliny the Younger (61—112 CE) was an oratory teacher, and often told his students to practice their public speaking outside class.

Pliny believed that the repetition and practice of speech would help students gain confidence in their speaking abilities.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Credit: inlibris.com

Before the idea of homework came to the United States, Germany’s newly formed nation-state had been giving students homework for years.

The roots of homework extend to ancient times, but it wasn’t until German Philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762—1814) helped to develop the Volksschulen (People’s Schools) that homework became mandatory.

Fichte believed that the state needed to hold power over individuals to create a unified Germany. A way to assert control over people meant that students attending the Volksshulen were required to complete assignments at home on their own time.

As a result, some people credit Fichte for being the inventor of homework.

Horace Mann

Credit: commons.wikimedia.org

The idea of homework spread across Europe throughout the 19th century.

So who created homework in the United States?

The history of education and homework now moves to Horace Mann (1796—1859), an American educational reformer, spent some time in Prussia. There, he learned more about Germany’s Volksshulen, forms of education , and homework practices.

Mann liked what he saw and brought this system back to America. As a result, homework rapidly became a common factor in students’ lives across the country.

Credit: medium.com

If you’ve ever felt curious about who invented homework, a quick online search might direct you to a man named Roberto Nevilis, a teacher in Venice, Italy.

As the story goes, Nevilis invented homework in 1905 (or 1095) to punish students who didn’t demonstrate a good understanding of the lessons taught during class.

This teaching technique supposedly spread to the rest of Europe before reaching North America.

Unfortunately, there’s little truth to this story. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that these online sources lack credible sources to back up this myth as fact.

In 1905, the Roman Empire turned its attention to the First Crusade. No one had time to spare on formalizing education, and classrooms didn’t even exist. So how could Nevilis spread the idea of homework when education remained so informal?

And when you jump to 1901, you’ll discover that the government of California passed a law banning homework for children under fifteen. Nevilis couldn’t have invented homework in 1905 if this law had already reached the United States in 1901.

Inside Creative House/Shutterstock.com

When it comes to the origins of homework, looking at the past shows us that there isn’t one person who created homework. Instead, examining the facts shows us that several people helped to bring the idea of homework into Europe and then the United States.

In addition, the idea of homework extends beyond what historians have discovered. After all, the concept of learning the necessary skills human beings need to survive has existed since the dawn of man.

More than 100 years have come and gone since Horace Mann introduced homework to the school system in the United States.

Therefore, it’s not strange to think that the concept of homework has changed, along with our people and culture.

In short, homework hasn’t always been considered acceptable. Let’s dive into the history or background of homework to learn why.

Homework is Banned! (The 1900s)

Important publications of the time, including the Ladies’ Home Journal and The New York Times, published articles on the negative impacts homework had on American children’s health and well-being.

As a result, California banned homework for children under fifteen in 1901. This law, however, changed again about a decade later (1917).

Children Needed at Home (The 1930s)

Formed in 1923, The American Child Health Association (ACHA) aimed to decrease the infant mortality rate and better support the health and development of the American child.

By the 1930s, ACHA deemed homework a form of child labor. Since the government recently passed laws against child labor , it became difficult to justify homework assignments. College students, however, could still receive homework tasks as part of their formal schooling.

Studio Romantic/Shutterstock.com

A Shift in Ideas (The 1940s—1950s)

During the early to mid-1900s, the United States entered the Progressive Era. As a result, the country reformed its public education system to help improve students’ learning.

Homework became a part of everyday life again. However, this time, the reformed curriculum required teachers to make the assignments more personal.

As a result, American students would write essays on summer vacations and winter breaks, participate in ‘show and tell,’ and more.

These types of assignments still exist today!

Homework Today (The 2000s)

The focus of American education shifted again when the US Department of Education was founded in 1979, aiming to uplevel education in the country by, among other things, prohibiting discrimination ensuring equal access, and highlighting important educational issues.

In 2022, the controversial nature of homework in public schools and formal education is once again a hot topic of discussion in many classrooms.

According to one study , more than 60% of college and high school students deal with mental health issues like depression and anxiety due to homework. In addition, the large number of assignments given to students takes away the time students spend on other interests and hobbies. Homework also negatively impacts sleep.

As a result, some schools have implemented a ban or limit on the amount of homework assigned to students.

Test your knowledge and check out these other facts about homework:

• Horace Mann is also known as the ‘father’ of the modern school system and the educational process that we know today (read more about Who Invented School ).
• With a bit of practice, homework can improve oratory and writing skills. Both are important in a student’s life at all stages.
• Homework can replace studying. Completing regular assignments reduces the time needed to prepare for tests.
• Homework is here to stay. It doesn’t look like teachers will stop assigning homework any time soon. However, the type and quantity of homework given seem to be shifting to accommodate the modern student’s needs.
• The optimal length of time students should spend on homework is one to two hours. Students who spent one to two hours on homework per day scored higher test results.
•   So, while completing assignments outside of school hours may be beneficial, spending, for example, a day on homework is not ideal.

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The U.S. Department of Education provides teachers with plenty of information and resources to help students with homework.

In general, teachers give students homework that requires them to employ four strategies. The four types of homework types include:

• Practice: To help students master a specific skill, teachers will assign homework that requires them to repeat the particular skill. For example, students must solve a series of math problems.
• Preparation: This type of homework introduces students to the material they will learn in the future. An example of preparatory homework is assigning students a chapter to read before discussing the contents in class the next day.
• Extension: When a teacher wants to get students to apply what they’ve learned but create a challenge, this type of homework is assigned. It helps to boost problem-solving skills. For example, using a textbook to find the answer to a question gets students to problem-solve differently.
• Integration: To solidify the student learning experience , teachers will create a task that requires the use of many different skills. An example of integration is a book report. Completing integration homework assignments helps students learn how to be organized, plan, strategize, and solve problems on their own. Encouraging effective study habits is a key idea behind homework, too.

Ultimately, the type of homework students receive should have a purpose, be focused and clear, and challenge students to problem solve while integrating lessons learned.

What’s the Purpose of Homework?

LightField Studios/Shutterstock.com

Homework aims to ensure individual students understand the information they learn in class. It also helps teachers to assess a student’s progress and identify strengths and weaknesses.

For example, school teachers use different types of homework like book reports, essays, math problems, and more to help students demonstrate their understanding of the lessons learned.

Does Homework Improve the Quality of Education?

Homework is a controversial topic today. Educators, parents, and even students often question whether homework is beneficial in improving the quality of education.

Let’s explore the pros and cons of homework to try and determine whether homework improves the quality of education in schools.

Homework Pros:

• Time Management Skills : Assigning homework with a due date helps students to develop a schedule to ensure they complete tasks on time. Personal responsibility amongst students is thereby promoted.
• More Time to Learn : Students encounter plenty of distractions at school. It’s also challenging for students to grasp the material in an hour or less. Assigning homework provides the student with the opportunity to understand the material.
• Improves Research Skills : Some homework assignments require students to seek out information. Through homework, students learn where to seek out good, reliable sources.

Homework Cons:

• Reduced Physical Activity : Homework requires students to sit at a desk for long periods. Lack of movement decreases the amount of physical activity, often because teachers assign students so much homework that they don’t have time for anything else. Time for students can get almost totally taken up with out-of-school assignments.
• Stuck on an Assignment: A student often gets stuck on an assignment. Whether they can’t find information or the correct solution, students often don’t have help from parents and require further support from a teacher. For underperforming students, especially, this can have a negative impact on their confidence and overall educational experience.
• Increases Stress : One of the results of getting stuck on an assignment is that it increases stress and anxiety. Too much homework hurts a child’s mental health, preventing them from learning and understanding the material.

Some research shows that homework doesn’t provide educational benefits or improve performance, and can lead to a decline in physical activities. These studies counter that the potential effectiveness of homework is undermined by its negative impact on students.

However, research also shows that homework benefits students—provided teachers don’t give them too much. Here’s a video from Duke Today that highlights a study on the very topic.

Homework Today

The question of “Who Invented Homework?” delves into the historical evolution of academic practices, shedding light on its significance in fostering responsibility among students and contributing to academic progress. While supported by education experts, homework’s role as a pivotal aspect of academic life remains a subject of debate, often criticized as a significant source of stress. Nonetheless, when balanced with extracurricular activities and integrated seamlessly into the learning process, homework continues to shape and refine students’ educational journeys.

Maybe one day, students won’t need to submit assignments or complete tasks at home. But until then, many students understand the benefits of completing homework as it helps them further their education and achieve future career goals.

Before you go, here’s one more question: how do you feel about homework? Do you think teachers assign too little or too much? Get involved and start a discussion in the comments!

Elena Kharichkina/Shutterstock.com

Who invented homework and why?

The creation of homework can be traced back to the Ancient Roman Pliny the Younger, a teacher of oratory—he is generally credited as being the father of homework! Pliny the Younger asked his students to practice outside of class to help them build confidence in their speaking skills.

Who invented homework as a punishment?

There’s a myth that the Italian educator Roberto Nevilis first used homework as a means of punishing his students in the early 20th century—although this has now been widely discredited, and the story of the Italian teacher is regarded as a myth.

Why did homework stop being a punishment?

There are several reasons that homework ceased being a form of punishment. For example, the introduction of child labor laws in the early twentieth century meant that the California education department banned giving homework to children under the age of fifteen for a time. Further, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, there was a growing emphasis on enhancing students’ learning, making homework assignments more personal, and nurturing growth, rather than being used as a form of punishment.

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Does 'Homework' Spelled Backwards Mean 'Child Abuse' in Latin?

Thousands of languages have existed throughout the history of humanity. there is no evidence the word "krowemoh" ever belonged to any of them., alex kasprak, published jan. 31, 2021.

About this rating

The claim that the word "homework" spelled backwards translates to "child abuse" in Latin has been a feature of the internet since at least March 2013 . In January 2021, a Reddit thread brought the assertion renewed interest .

The claim is false. The word "krowemoh" does not exist in the Latin language. In fact, not even the character "W" existed in Latin, whose alphabet contained 23 characters . Latin, the language of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, had largely died out by the 6th century AD — replaced by regional dialects that would ultimately become the Romance languages of Europe.

A form of the character W was first used around the 7th century AD, because the Latin alphabet did not have a character to represent the sound /w/ spoken in Germanic and old English languages. As a solution, writers began using "uu" (or "vv" as u and v referred to the same character in the classical Latin alphabet) to represent the sound /w/. The character we now know as "W" did not see widespread use until the 1500s , well after Latin-speaking humans were creating new words in that language.

All of this is to say that "krowemoh" is not a word and it certainly does not mean "child abuse" in Latin or any other language we are aware of.

By Alex Kasprak

Alex Kasprak is an investigative journalist and science writer reporting on scientific misinformation, online fraud, and financial crime.

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Introduction: Origin and Evolution of Language—An Interdisciplinary Perspective

• Published: 02 May 2018
• Volume 37 , pages 219–234, ( 2018 )

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1 In Search for a Paradigm: The Origin of Language from Biolinguistics to Embodied Cognition

Anyone who intends to deal with the origins of language should face what critics describe as an inescapable truth: since language does not fossilize, the investigation of its origins should not rely on empirical evidence but merely have a mainly theoretical character. These considerations are at the heart of two well-known edicts— Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1866 and the Philological Society of London in 1872—that forbade all members from presenting speeches on the topic. The arguments underlying these edicts have a strong intuitive character and seem guided by a matter of common sense: it is simply not possible to rewind tape to the starting point; therefore, the origin of language is not empirically analyzable. Everything done relies on speculation, the field (very dangerous, according to many) of philosophy rather than science.

Ostracism imposed by the two Societies have had negative consequences for a long time. However, the contemporary situation is radically different: for many years, research on language origins is in a revival and currently one of the most discussed topics in literature on human communicative capabilities. In addition, the essential feature of ongoing research is the clear prevalence of empirical over theoretical studies (Fitch 2017 ; Wacewicz and Zywiczynski 2017 ). Paradoxical though it may seem, the big issue today is opposite to that raised by the edicts: it is finding the key to the problem of too much available data.

1.1 Interdisciplinarity

Several disciplines contribute to the discussion on the origin of language: computer simulation, cognitive psychology, genetics, paleoanthropology, and comparative studies, as some examples (see Tallerman and Gibson 2012 ). Some disciplines employ sophisticated analysis techniques resulting in empirical evidence inconceivable until a few years ago. The discovery of mirror neurons—an example from neuroscience to which we will return—was a turning point for studying mechanisms underlying language origin (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998 ; Arbib 2005 ). Further, mirror neurons are an interpretative key to promote a new research paradigm within this field (Hostetter and Alibali 2008 ; Glenberg and Gallese 2012 ). According to Fitch ( 2017 ), research on paleogenetics represents the time machine allowing us to reconstruct the starting point of human communication. In Fitch’s opinion, “If a single empirical development warrants optimism and excitement about the coming decades of language evolution research, it is these advances in genetics and genomics” (p. 18). Other technologically advanced research areas are computer simulation (Kirby et al. 2014 ) and evolutionary robotics (e.g. Cangelosi 2012 ). Among traditional disciplines, comparative studies on nonhuman species continue to play a major role, specifically comparisons with other primates (e.g., Hewes 1973 ; Pollick and de Waal 2007 ) as well as other species that are phylogenetically distant from Homo sapiens , such as birds (Pfenning et al. 2014 ). Moreover, there is a widespread confront with extinct species of hominins, especially Homo neanderthalensis (Dediu and Levinson 2013 , 2018 ; Mithen 2005 ; Lieberman and McCarthy 2007 ) but also with more ancient forefathers such as Homo ergaster / erectus (Corballis 2002 ; Donald 1991 ). Examples showing the role of empirical studies in the origin of language could multiply but, for present purposes, there is no need to delve further.

What considerations should be made starting from these studies? First, the flourishing of empirical investigations on language origins allows the overturn of common opinion about the entirely speculative character of the topic itself. Assuming a considerably different perspective compared to the past, it is possible to reflect on language origins in terms of an “ongoing transition of scientific research on language evolution from one dominated by speculation and pet hypothesis to ‘normal’ science, marked by attempts to empirically evaluate multiple plausible hypotheses” (Fitch 2017 , p. 3). That said, the huge volume of data available and the heterogeneity of disciplines have had problematic effects on research: each discipline contributing to the study of language is different from another, so the first difficulty is identification of a point of convergence among extremely heterogeneous empirical results. As pointed out by Gong et al. ( 2013 ), the first step in this direction relies on the interdisciplinary character of research. In their view, only a perspective of this kind "based on pooled knowledge from diverse disciplines to reconcile seemingly contrary positions and rule out solutions plausible only within a single discipline, can lead to a biologically plausible, computationally feasible, and behaviorally adequate understanding of language and its evolution" (p. 10).

The available “bewilderingly diverse and voluminous [data] span a set of discipline that no single scholar, however knowledgeable, could hope to individually master” (Fitch 2017 , p. 24). This interdisciplinary approach appears to be an essential step. From a methodological point of view, the interdisciplinary character of a study on language origins is the distinctive feature of current research compared to previous investigation—a feature reflecting the complex and multistratified nature of language.

However, the reference to interdisciplinarity is not enough to overcome a second difficulty—theoretically more relevant—imposed by the “bewilderingly diverse and voluminous” body of evidence. Fitch ( 2017 ) argues that the problem to face “is not with data or hypotheses, but sociological” (p. 6). In his opinion, the partition of knowledges due to multiplying of disciplines has led to a significant mutual suspicion among scholars. Fitch’s considerations should not be underestimated; equally, the issue of theoretical models should not be underrated. Different fields of research communicating with one another require common ground—a shared conceptual space in which to construct connections among the various disciplines. Only within this space could empirical studies build hypotheses, supported by strong inferences, characterizing multidisciplinary research on language origins: “the method of empirically testing the predictions of multiple scientifically plausible hypotheses simultaneously” (Fitch 2017 , p. 6). What identifies strong inferences is included in the word simultaneously , emphasizing the need for a “bird’s-eye view” and the ability to make connections and convergences that cannot be understood from inside each discipline. Construction of a shared conceptual space is possible with a double plan: the plan of the achievements of each discipline and that of building interpretative models capable of providing a unitary perspective on different data. From these considerations follows the difficulty imposed by Fitch’s “bewilderingly diverse and voluminous” body of data, strictly connected to the investigation, selection, and choice of suitable interpretative models.

The flourishing of interpretative models goes hand in hand with the flourishing of empirical disciplines. Countless theoretical proposals stress some specific aspects of language and address the issue of origins from a multidisciplinary perspective. Tomasello ( 2008 ), for example, combines different fields of study and theoretical topics—from the topic of altruism to the issue of the gestural foundation, from the function of intentionality to the role played by specific cognitive systems as mindreading—and proposes the idea that the origin of human communication is connected to specific ways of cooperation of our species. In a similar way, studying the role of systems as temporal and spatial projection in language processing, Corballis ( 2017 ) proposes a model in which studies of cognitive psychology and neuroscience integrate with data from ethology and paleoanthropology. Tomasello and Corballis represent merely two approaches for constructing models capable of proposing a unitary perspective from the contributions provided by different disciplines. That said, the number of models is just as problematic as the amount of empirical data. The effort of constructing a shared conceptual space requires further effort to build more general conceptual research program.

1.2 From Models to Paradigms

Many scholars interested in language origin research (e.g., Bickerton 2012 ; Tattersall this volume) have explicitly assumed Chomsky’s model of language, that of Universal Grammar (UG), which is still relevant in the current debate (e.g., Hauser et al. 2014 ) despite some criticism (e.g., Tomasello 2009 ; Pennisi and Falzone 2016 ; Corballis 2017 ). Biolinguistics is the multidisciplinary enterprise that assumes UG as the reference model (Chomsky 2007 ; Lennerberg 1967 ; Piattelli-Palmarini 1974 ). Referring to UG, biolinguistics has a clear theoretic advantage over competitive interpretative perspectives: a refined and well-established conception of language, the outcome of > 50 years of thinking. A conception of this kind is also valuable from an empirical point of view, such as the illuminating example of investigations aimed at corroborating the principle of structure dependency and the autonomy of syntax (Musso et al. 2003 ). Furthermore, the adhesion to UG has implications for wider conceptual issues that go beyond the reflection on language (e.g., the Cartesian nature of UG affecting the way we conceptualize human nature). For all these reasons, UG represents an ideal reference framework to construct a shared conceptual space in which to interpret data and elaborate hypotheses from different disciplines. UG is more than a conceptual model; it is a genuine interpretative paradigm in the sense used by Kuhn ( 1962 ).

The minimalist turn within this generative paradigm (Chomsky 1995 ) fortifies the idea of UG as a shared conceptual space. In fact, according to some scholars (Benítez-Burraco and Boeckx 2014 ; Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco 2014 ), the minimalist program paved the way for development of biolinguistics 2.0, a theoretical approach that overcomes some difficulties that still characterize classic biolinguistics. Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco ( 2014 ) have suggested that biolinguistics 1.0 is “unable to properly deal with the attested complexity observed at the genetic, neurological, developmental, or even evolutionary level” (p. 10). Instead, biolinguistics 2.0 is a wider and more general research program (a paradigm) that is able to encompass different interpretative models, even those promoted by scholars who do not work within the generative paradigm. Di Sciullo and Boeckx ( 2011 ) state that “biolinguistics (…) allows for the exploration of many avenue of research: formalist; functionalist; nativist and insisting on the uniqueness of the language faculty; nativist about general (human) cognition but not about language per se; etc. From Chomsky to Givon, from Lenneberg to Tomasello, all this is biolinguistics” (p. 5).

In allowing minimalism to launch a new phase within biolinguistics, there is the distinction between faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN; Hauser et al. 2002 ). Through minimalism, Chomsky moved away from the early “isolationist” view (the idea that language is processed by a specific module) and led the way to a broader-minded perspective in which language functioning is not autonomous from other cognitive systems. The idea of considering language as the broad FLB and not as FLN is a way to explain language functioning through more complex cognitive architectures than those postulated by classic biolinguistics. Furthermore, many cognitive devices characterizing FLB are also present in nonhuman animals; the focus on FLB allows development of a continuistic view of language. In light of these considerations, it seems possible to argue that early Chomsky concerns are outdated regarding the relationship between UG and evolutionary theory (Chomsky 2010 ; Berwick and Chomsky 2015 ). Therefore, the minimalist turn has allowed to again address the taboo question of language origins. As highlighted by Wacewicz and Żywiczyński ( 2014 ), indeed, anything important regarding language origins is ascribable to FLB.

So far, so good. Biolinguistics seems to be an interpretative paradigm able to include in a unitary perspective different theoretical models. Moreover, it offers a shared conceptual space useful in dealing with heterogeneous data that, as we have argued, might represent a risk for the multidisciplinary research on language evolution.

1.3 Uniqueness

Biolinguistics presents several aspects that need to be analyzed. In our opinion, when it comes to the origins of language, the reference to a refined and well-established model of language represents both the strength and weakness of such paradigm. More specifically, the problematic issue is represented by uniqueness —an issue in the Chomskyan perspective that is linked to Cartesian tradition (see for a discussion Ferretti and Adornetti 2014 ). There is no harm in emphasizing traits that differentiate human language from other forms of communication, nor in considering language as the peculiar trait of humans. But what is true for humans must also be true for other animals. As pointed out by Pinker ( 1994 ), the elephant has a type of nose that distinguishes it from all other animals, and the bat uses a distinctive perceptual system to relate to the environment. In such cases, the concept of uniqueness is not a problematic issue because it is consistent with Darwinian continuism and gradualism. The problem arises when the reference to uniqueness is used in support of the idea that is not possible to seek the precursors of language in hominins and species different from Homo sapiens because of a qualitative difference.

There are two possible moves to curtail such a Cartesian drift in the research on language uniqueness. The first is to appeal to the idea that FLB includes some traits shared with other species. According to Fitch ( 2017 ), “Thus, despite the fact that language in toto is unique to our species, most components underlying it are shared, sometimes very broadly and sometimes only with a few other species” (p. 7). Genetic data play a key role in this regard, as the focus on “deep homologies” allows possible comparison with many nonhuman species (see also Fitch 2005 ). According to Fitch ( 2017 ), indeed, narrow comparative approaches must be extended because “there is a rising awareness that distant relatives like birds may have as much, or more, to tell us about the biology and evolution of human traits as comparisons with other primates” (p. 6).

The second move against the Cartesian notion of uniqueness is showing that language emerged outside Homo sapiens . This considers the communication systems of our species’ ancestors as possible precursors of language. Consistent with that, some authors suggest that language arose in Homo heidelbergensis (Dediu and Levinson 2013 ) or in Homo ergaster–erectus (Corballis 2002 ; McBride 2014 ), while some others consider language even more ancient (Shaw-Williams 2017 ). In such a framework, the hardest debate is focused on the linguistic abilities of Homo neanderthalensis . The view by (Lieberman 1975 ; Lieberman and McCarthy 2007 ) according to which Neanderthals had no articulatory capacity to speak has been the prevailing perspective for a long time (e.g., Bickerton 1990 ). New data from different disciplines (e.g., paleoanthropology, archaeology, genetics) are now challenging this view (for an overview, see Fitch 2010 ; Dediu and Levinson 2013 , 2018 ) paving the way to building a gradualist scenario. In fact, according to Dediu and Levinson ( 2013 ), modern humans, Denisovan and Neanderthal share a common genetic line that can be considered the basis of language.

Two considerations are worthy: the first concerns considering the specificity of language in the more general framework of continuism; claiming that modern language is in continuity with more ancient forms of communication does not mean overlooking those specificities that characterize language as we know it today. The second consideration is that, despite elements of continuity attributed to the traits of FLB, the crux of language is still represented by FNL, namely by “those traits that are unique to humans and unique, within humans, to language itself” (Fitch 2017 , p. 5; see also Fitch 2005 ; Hauser et al. 2002 ). Ascribing such traits to language means asserting that its essential elements (what makes it “language”) are related to unique features with no precursors in the animal kingdom. Thus, continuity with other animals and other species of hominins applies only to those aspects of language that are not linked to FLN; that is, those aspects not specifically linguistic.

This is where the strength of biolinguistic paradigm also turns out to be its limitation. The reference to a model of language strongly linked to UG is the crux for authors more willing to revise the notion of uniqueness. Thus, for instance, while criticizing Chomsky for his position on gradualism and continuism, Dediu and Levinson ( 2013 ) defined language “as the full suite of abilities to map sound to meaning, including the infrastructure that supports it (vocal anatomy, neurocognition, ethology of communication)—FLB or ‘faculty of language broad’ in the sense of Hauser et al. ( 2002 )” (p. 2). Considering that syntax is the mechanism underlying the mapping between sound and meaning (Jackendoff 1993 ), FLN then paves the way for the issue of uniqueness. According to Fitch ( 2017 ), “without hierarchical syntax, we would not have modern language [because] without this fundamental characteristic, our open-ended ability to map novel thoughts onto understandable signals would be impossible” (pp. 10–11). At the base of this kind of considerations there is a definition of language in terms of “a complex faculty that allows us to encode, elaborate and communicate our thoughts and experiences via words combined into hierarchical structures called sentences” (Fitch 2017 , p. 7). Although investigations on the communicative abilities of animals such as birds, distant from Homo sapiens , have shown their capacity to combine elements in a rule-governed manner (a basic phonological “syntax” of birdsong), such a capacity is considered insufficient to reach the human phrasal syntax and semantics.

From these considerations follows that the syntactic component (rather than vocal or semantic-pragmatic ones) is the distinctive trait of language when comparing it to animal communication. Distinguishing our way of communication from that of other animals is crucial to the issue of language origins. Not under discussion is the fact that the topic of emergence of syntax is a main problem in the agenda on the studies of language origins. Instead, the point at issue is whether the topic of language origins should coincide with the topic of the origin of syntax: in other words, should syntax be considered the distinctive trait that, in the early stages of language, ensured the transition from animal to human communication? In the next section, we consider this point as the main limit of the well-established model of language promoted by biolinguistics 2.0.

1.4 Compatibilism

In our view, the first attempt made by Pinker and Bloom ( 1990 ) to integrate Chomsky’s model of language in an evolutionary context is an example of the limitations of the biolinguistic paradigm. Assuming UG as the indisputable starting point of the argument, Pinker and Bloom disputed Chomsky in proving UG to be compatible with the theory of evolution. Their proposal was based on the following logical argument: the only successful account of the origin of complex biological structure is the theory of natural selection; language is a complex biological structure (subsequently refuted by minimalism); the origin of language must be explained by the theory of natural selection. This argument led to a new stage in the study of the relationship between UG and evolutionary theory—namely, a compatibilist phase in which the theoretical structure of UG represents the a priori assumption that the empirical research is called to verify. The main goal underlying this compatibilist perspective is finding a model of the theory of evolution that better fits the model of language. This compatibilist attitude, in fact, has characterized Chomsky’s thought development, from the early aversion to evolutionary theory to the recent adhesion to evo-devo approaches centered on the criticism toward Pinker and Bloom’s ( 1990 ) neo-Darwinism (Chomsky 2010 ; Berwick and Chomsky 2015 ).

Relevant to the present article is that this sort of compatibilism also affects the study of language origins. In fact, if the starting point of investigation is the model of language, the analysis of the origin of communication strongly depends on the conclusive outcome of the process. The way in which Berwick and Chomsky ( 2015 ) synthetize the evolutionary steps that in their opinion have led to language provides an example of the implications of adopting this kind of analysis:

We enter here into large and extremely interesting topics that we will have to put aside. Let us just summarize briefly what seems to be the current best guess about the unity and diversity of language and thought. In some completely unknown way, our ancestors developed human concepts. At some time in the very recent past, apparently some time before 80,000 years ago if we can judge from associated symbolic proxies, individuals in a small group of hominids in East Africa underwent a minor biological change that provided the operation Merge—an operation that takes human concepts as computational atoms and yields structured expressions that, systematically interpreted by the conceptual system, provide a rich language of thought. (…). At some later stage, the internal language of thought was connected to the sensorimotor system, a complex task that can be solved in many different ways and at different times (p. 87).

Since language relies on syntax (and since syntax depends on Merge), the evolutionary steps that have led to language should include not only an explanation of how Merge appeared but also a description of how the necessary tools (i.e., concepts) that provided operation Merge have arisen. Despite this, Berwick and Chomsky ( 2015 ) interpret the evolution of Merge in terms of a (casual) biological mutation and assume the emergence of concepts as a given without explaining it. In other words, this way of viewing language directs the evolutionary process.

As we have suggested, biolinguistics can count on a refined and well-established model of language. Because of this, the biolinguistic paradigm can foster hypotheses and predictions in different areas of research that share a common idea on the nature of language. That said, it is certainly true that interpretative paradigms are necessary to organize the large amount of heterogeneous data from different disciplines, but it is also true that choice of the paradigm strongly affects construction of a unitary model of language and its origins. What if the perspective is overturned? What if the theory of evolution (and not the model of language) is the starting point of the analysis? At the base of such change is the idea that language must meet the conformity constraint of the theory of evolution rather than the compatibilist one. This idea paves the way to construction of a new interpretative model of language inspired by Darwin (more than Descartes); for this reason, it is not only plausible but also advisable when considering the question of the origin of linguistic capacity. Following these considerations, the next sections will consider a new paradigm that, unlike biolinguistics, assumes the principles of evolutionary theory as points of reference.

2 Toward a New Paradigm for the Study of Language and Mind: The Embodied Approach

The investigation of human mind within the field of cognitive science has been influenced for a long time by what Hurley ( 1998 ) defined the “classical sandwich model”. The idea is that the external layers of the sandwich, that is, the sensory and the motor are not so important after all, because what matters is the inner layer, the cognitive processes. Furthermore, according to this metaphor, the sensory and the motor are separate, they are just input and output systems, which do not affect what happens at the level of the cognitive processes. This way of understanding the relation between sensory-motor and cognitive processes has also influenced the view on language. Considering the mind as a device that manipulates symbols, symbolic theories of meaning have assumed that linguistic meaning arises from the syntactic combination of mental symbols. This view is often conjoined with a modularist assumption that meaning is processed in an informationally encapsulated way such that these mental symbols are amodal, i.e., largely decoupled from sensory, motor and emotional processes (e.g., Fodor 1975 ; Pylyshyn 1984 ).

This traditional view has been more recently criticised and rejected by the embodied theories of mind, which assume that supposedly “high” processes such as language and thought are grounded in “low” sensory, motor and emotional processes (Barsalou 1999 ; Kemmerer 2010 ; Gallese and Lakoff 2005 ; Prinz 2005 ; Werning 2012 ; Werning et al. 2013 ). According to these theories, in fact, there is no such distinction between “low” and “high” processes, because “[c]ognitive activity takes place in the context of a real-world environment, and it inherently involves perception and action” (Wilson 2002 , p. 626). From this perspective, cognition is grounded, context-dependent, situated, anchored to experience: the organism’s environment has a central role in its behavior (the environment is part of the cognitive system); such environment is not only a rich source of constraints and opportunities for the organism, but also a context that gives meaning to its actions (Beer 2014 ). Furthermore, cognition is for action: “the function of the mind is to guide action, and cognitive mechanisms such as perception and memory must be understood in terms of their ultimate contribution to situation-appropriate behaviour” (Wilson 2002 , p. 626). Focusing on the primacy of action, embodied theories lead to a strong rejection of the traditional cartesian distinction between “knowing how” (execution) and “knowing that” (competence), because all knowledge, not only the “knowing how” is supposed to emerge from doing. Furthermore, the theoretical “knowing that” has not anymore a privileged status as the foundational way of acquiring knowledge. In the following sections we will suggest that these two aspects—grounding and the primacy of action—are important for the building of a model of language alternative to biolinguistics. Precisely, we will argue that: the action system has a crucial role in language evolution and that the acknowledgment of this allows to elaborate perspectives of language emergence in line with the conformity constraint (Sect.  3 ); the embodied approach, supposing a kind of anchoring to the external reality, is suitable to explain a crucial property of human communication, i.e. how language is appropriate to the situation (Sect.  4 ). Before going into details of these arguments, it is necessary to analyze how the embodied account has deeply influenced the way of thinking about language.

According to the embodied theories of mind, language comprehension is based on the multimodal simulation of perceptions, actions, and emotions (e.g., Barsalou 1999 , 2010 ; Gibbs 2006 ; Glenberg et al. 2013 ; Lakoff 1987 ; Pecher and Zwaan 2005 ). Therefore, understanding the meaning of a word like “chair” partially re-activates the brain regions involved in perceiving chairs and the motor areas relevant to interactions with chairs (as well as emotion circuits if the word elicits affective states). This notion of comprehension provides a way of addressing the “symbol grounding problem”, that is, the problem of explaining how symbols can grasp reality and be meaningful (cf. Harnad 1990 ). As revealed by Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (Searle 1980 ), amodal-symbolic theories seem to have difficulties explaining that, given that no matter how many abstract symbols a subject relates to one another, she is never going to determine the meaning of the sentence.

The sciences of mind and brain are currently facing the challenge of accommodating in a unifying framework (a paradigm different than biolinguistics) growing evidence in favour of this embodied model of language. Neuroimaging investigations have supported this view exploring several different domains. For example, in the domain of perception, it has been shown that perceptual brain regions that process object-related information are also activated by as words related to visual features (e.g., “brown”; Pulvermüller and Hauk 2006 ), odours (e.g. “cinnamon”; Gonzalez et al. 2006 ), sounds (e.g., “telephone”; Kiefer et al. 2008 ), and taste (“salt”; Barrós-Loscertales et al. 2012 ). The domain of emotions and pain has also been explored with a variety of methods, including EEG (Rak et al. 2013 ), fMRI (Richter et al. 2010 ) and behavioural measures (Reuter et al. 2017 ), producing converging results that suggest that language processing hinges upon processes that are active when people actually feel emotions and pain.

As for actions, it is known that somatotopic areas in the motor and premotor cortex, which are active when subjects move specific body parts (e.g., “face”, “leg”, “arm”), are also active when they understand action-related words that refer to those body parts (e.g., “lick”, “pick”, or “kick”; Pulvermüller 2005 ) and motion sentences (Tettamanti et al. 2005 ), and the processing of action-related verbs is impaired specifically in patients with degenerative brain diseases that affect the motor system, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Grossmann et al. 2008 ), Parkinson’s disease (e.g., Cotelli et al. 2007 ) and other motor neuron diseases (Bak et al. 2001 ).

Starting from the assumption that people have bodies by means of which they explore the surrounding environment, the embodied theories of mind have argued that there is a relation of mutual inter-dependence between action and perception (Berthoz 1997 ). Perception is indeed action-oriented, as expressed by the notion of “affordances” which, following Gibson ( 1979 ), are defined as properties things have in virtue of being the object of certain potential actions. The neuroscientific plausibility of this notion is supported by the finding that a set of neurons in the premotor cortex called “canonical neurons” respond not only when manipulable objects are actually manipulated but also when they are simply perceived (see for a review Martin 2007 ). Moreover, canonical neurons are also active when tool-related nouns are presented (Cattaneo et al. 2010 ; Marino et al. 2011 ) and behavioural studies confirm that the processing of nouns can interact with motor activity (Tucker and Ellis 2004 ; Lindemann et al. 2006 ). Furthermore, affordances seem to be involved in the construction of sentence meaning. This has been shown by Glenberg and Robertson ( 2000 ) in behavioural studies in which sentences containing affordance violations (e.g., “After wading barefoot in the lake, Erik used his glasses to dry his feet”) were judged as less sensible than semantically and grammatically matched sentences with no violations (e.g., “After wading barefoot in the lake, Erik used his shirt to dry his feet”). Also, using the EEG method, it has been shown that the N400 component of the ERPs is sensitive to the modulation of object affordances as induced by the previous linguistic context (Cosentino et al. 2017 ).

Converging evidence from different disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, neurolinguistics, and neuropsychology, has informed the theorizing about the embodiment of mind, leading initially some scholars to suggest that a radical shift of paradigm was happening with respect to more traditional amodal-symbolic theories. Currently, most researchers acknowledge that the correct approach lies probably in the between, but the debate is still completely open as to level of embodiment and involvement in different processing stages. Theories of language origin and evolution have been deeply influenced by this interdisciplinary discussion, making the notion of “action” a very important attractor in the theory space concerning how language emerged and evolved. There are at least three levels of involvement of the notion of “action” in explanations of language origin and evolution.

The first, more obvious, way of endorsing the link between action and language from an evolutionary perspective is constituted by the well-represented strand of gestural theories of language evolution. Second, the idea of a strong connection between language and action is the starting assumption of some models of language evolution, which assume that the mechanisms originally evolved for action control might have been exploited for language, at both the grammatical and semantic level (see Glenberg and Gallese 2012 ). This idea has been declined in different ways, but the most representative is maybe the so-called “mirror system hypothesis” (see Arbib et al. 2014 for a review). Finally, the notion of “action” connects theories of language origin and evolution to the so-called motor account of social cognition (e.g., Cosentino 2014 ). This approach addresses the issue of language evolution focusing on the pragmatics of language (see Ferretti 2013 ) and assuming that the ability to read other people’s communicative intentions crucially involves the capacity to understand their actions (Blakemore and Decety 2001 ). In the following sections, we now turn to these different approaches.

3 Evolution of Expressive System from an Interdisciplinary Action-Oriented Perspective

The embodied models discussed in the previous section have important consequences for the question of language origins. The idea that language is grounded in “low” sensory-motor processes has allowed scholars to elaborate bottom-up perspectives of language emergence, which focusing on the constituent capacities underlying larger cognitive phenomena are more in line with evolutionary biology. In other words, embracing a model of knowledge as action permits development of a language model that meets the conformity constraint of the theory of evolution rather than the compatibilist one. Furthermore, adhesion to such a model (setting aside the distinction between competence and execution typical of biolinguistics) allows us to reconsider the fundamental role of the expressive dimension of communication for both the origin and functioning of language. In fact, perspectives that embrace the idea of “language as action” deal with the issue of language origin referring to evolution of the communicative expressive modality. Acknowledgment that the action system has a crucial role in language comprehension and production has provided new views on the involvement of such a system in language evolution, bolstering the gesture-first theory of human communication, according to which human language first originated as a gestural-based communicative system (Arbib 2005 ; Arbib et al. 2008 ; Armstrong and Wilcox 2007 ; Corballis 2010a , b ; Fogassi and Ferrari 2007 ).

The gesture-first theory has taken advantage of the interdisciplinary enterprise that characterizes language evolution research (for a review, see Corballis 2010a ). The first modern effort in this direction was that of anthropologist Hewes ( 1973 ). He reopened the way to the studies on language origins, explaining the origin of human communication in a gestural theoretical framework and synthetizing evidence from primatology (i.e., the success of teaching sign-based communication systems to nonhuman apes; Gardner and Gardner 1969 ), paleoanthropology (the late emergence in human evolution of the full anatomic equipment for vocal production; Lieberman and Crelin 1971 ) and neuroscience (the relationship between handedness and lateralization; Lennerberg 1967 ). Nonetheless, since the 1990s, gestural theory has become a very influential model to account for the origin of human communication. The reason is tied to an important neuroscientific achievement: discovery of mirror neurons in the F5 area of the premotor cortex of the macaque’s brain (di Pellegrino et al. 1992 ; Gallese et al. 1996 ). These neurons are defined as mirror because they allow a kind of mirroring between perception and action. Specifically, they discharge when the monkey performs an intentional act with its hands (e.g., trying to grasp an object) and when it observes another primate (human or monkey) accomplish a similar intentional act, unlike the so-called canonical neurons, which respond only to presentation of the object. The functional role of mirror neurons is relevant to the gestural origin of language. According to several authors (e.g., Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008 ), their primary function is related to an implicit and nonreflective understanding of manual actions: these neurons allow the subject to understand actions made by others through mapping those actions on acts that he or she is able to perform (Rizzolatti et al. 2001 ).

When highlighting the role of mirror neurons in manual action understanding, several scholars hypothesized that these neurons may have had a key role in a communication system based on hand gestures that paved the way to human language (e.g., Arbib 2005 ; Corballis 2010b ; Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998 ). One of the key elements of this hypothesis is that the F5 area of the ventral premotor cortex of the macaque is homologous to Broca’s area in humans, specifically to Broadman area 44 (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998 ). In humans, this area is involved in general motor functions, such as the control of the complex hand movements (Binkofski and Buccino 2004 ), but it also plays a key role in some linguistic processes (e.g., Broca 1861 ; Embick et al. 2000 ; Fedorenko et al. 2012 ). As Broca’s area developed from a region originally involved in the processing of action, one could assume that the ability to recognize and perform manual actions provided the basis for developing the ability to perform and recognize communicative hand gestures that thereafter contributed to development of brain mechanisms that support spoken language (for a discussion, see Adornetti and Ferretti 2014 ). This provides an example of what has been called “neural reuse of action perception circuits for language” (for a review, see Pulvermüller 2018 ), the idea that mechanisms primarily carrying motor and sensory functions in animals (in our case, a system of manual action understanding) are altered and enhanced in humans to allow for their neural reuse in the service of linguistic or other higher cognitive functions (Anderson 2010 ).

This gesture-first account has been further corroborated by comparative data on monkey and ape communication that shows the existence of important differences between their vocal and gestural communicative signals. Although it is well known that nonhuman primates produce different acoustically vocal signals to communicate about different events or entities (e.g., Gouzoules et al. 1984 ; Seyfarth et al. 1980 ; Slocombe and Zuberbühler 2005 ), it is attested that gestural communication systems in these animals are more flexible than are vocal ones (Tomasello 2008 ). Moreover, neurophysiological investigations showed that nonhuman primates do not have the full neural equipment necessary for vocal control that would enable the production of novel sounds from the environment (Ploog 2002 ). The voluntary modulation, exaggeration, or inhibition of their calls can be viewed as an internal emotional state, such as the production of human emotional vocalizations (e.g., cry, laugh, scream; Meguerditchian and Vauclair 2014 ). Therefore, although the vocal mode of communication is often considered a precursor of speech (Burling 2005 ; MacNeilage 2008 ), animal vocal behavior alone does not seem to represent a starting point for the evolution of human communication.

Contrary to vocalizations, which are mostly instinctive expressions of emotions, nonhuman primate (especially apes) make manual gestures (i.e., visible movements of hands produced without using or touching objects) that can be voluntarily produced by the animal and used in a more flexible way than vocal signals. For example, apes can use gestures in different contexts to communicate different things (Pollick and de Waal 2007 ), such as modifying the behavior of a specific receiver (Roberts et al. 2013 ). Furthermore, when producing gestures, apes appraise the attentional state of the recipient: visual gestures (not accompanied by any sound) are frequently used when the receiver is paying attention to the indicator (Tomasello and Call 2007 ), while auditory and tactile gestures are produced to attract the attention of an individual who is not looking at the signaler (Tomasello et al. 1994 ). From this view, ape gestures and human language share a very important property: intentionality (for a discussion, see Roberts et al. 2013 ).

Nevertheless, the gesture-first theory of language origin is not without criticism. The most powerful argument against it is the so-called “modality transition problem” (Hewes 1973 ; Orzechowski et al. 2016 ). If language first emerged as a gestural–manual system, why should language have assumed the vocal-auditory form dominant today? This question is very relevant when considering that sign language—the communicative system used by people who are deaf—is as expressive as spoken language (Stokoe 1960 ). The gestural/manual system should have produced sign language as its natural consequence. In this respect, Wacewicz and Zywiczynski ( 2017 maintained that "the persistence of the problem, together with new sources of empirical data … was a powerful motivation for language evolution researchers to look to the multimodal alternatives whereby, from the start, the evolutionary emergence of language involved an intimate connection and interplay between the vocal-auditory and motor-visual modalities (e.g., Kendon 2011 ; McNeill 2012 ; Collins 2013 ; Sandler 2013 ; Zlatev 2014 )" (p. 4).

Some of the arguments supporting the multimodal scenario come from gesturology research, according to which both the organization of body movement and speech contribute to the process of languaging (Kendon 2004 ). The idea is that gesture and speech comprise a single multimodal system with gesture not as an ornament or accompaniment to speech but rather part of it (Goldin-Meadow 2003 ; McNeill 2012 ). Adhering to this view, Hostetter and Alibali ( 2008 ) highlighted that both gesture and speech rely on the same simulative processes. As described in the previous section, simulations are neural enactments or reenactments of interactions with the world. According to Hostetter and Alibali ( 2008 ), when a speaker engages in these reenactments, the same motor and perceptual cerebral areas are recruited that would be involved in physically performing or perceiving the scene. Forming a simulation evokes a motor plan that can be expressed alongside speech and gesture. Thus, gestures are a natural byproduct of the cognitive processes that underlie speaking; it is not possible to consider the two separately because both are expressions of the same simulation (Pouw and Hostetter 2016 ).

The multimodal theory of language evolution, the idea that bodily-visual and vocal-auditory signals were fully integrated at least from the beginning of language (e.g., McNeill 2012 ), is supported by recent comparative data. It has been shown that apes, especially chimpanzees, have a multimodal system of communication whereby the production of gestures is often associated with vocal signals and facial expressions (Liebal et al. 2013 ; Taglialatela et al. 2015 ). Furthermore, neurofunctional investigations have revealed that chimpanzees’ manual gesturing selectively activates their homologue to Broca’s area (Taglialatela et al. 2008 ) and that the pattern of activation is enhanced in subjects who simultaneously use both gestural and vocal signals (attention-getting calls; Taglialatela et al. 2011 ). These neurofunctional data support the “potential existence in chimpanzees of a multimodal intentional system that not only includes gestures but can also integrate, in some individuals, oro-facial and atypical vocal sounds” (Meguerditchian and Vauclair 2014 , p. 145).

These latter neurofunctional findings point to the question of connections between the mouth and the hand that may have played a role in the evolution of language. The mirror system (again) is relevant to explain these connections. Evidence attests that the monkey premotor cortex is involved in the production and perception of both oro-facial and forelimb actions: some neurons in F5 area activate when the monkey makes a movement to grasp an object with either the hand or mouth (Rizzolatti et al. 1988 ). Another category of mirror neurons, called “communicative mouth mirror neurons,” is activated by the observation of both mouth-communicative gestures (i.e., lip-smacking, lip protrusion, and tongue protrusion) carried out by the experimenter standing in front of the primate using motor actions associated with eating (Ferrari et al. 2003 ). Many investigations have attested this link in humans between hand and mouth (e.g., Gentilucci et al. 2001 ). For instance, Iverson and Thelen ( 1999 ) proposed that an association between the manual system and the vocal system is present from birth and paves the way for embodied language processing later in life. Pexman and Wellsby ( 2016 ) found a connection between children’s manual dexterity—the ability to make coordinated hand and finger movements to grasp and manipulate objects—and language skills. Based on the presence of a coupling between hand and mouth, Fogassi and Ferrari ( 2007 ) hypothesized that "the ventral premotor cortex, endowed with the control of both hand and mouth actions, could have played a pivotal role in associating gestures with vocalizations, thus producing new motor representations. At this stage, the mirror-neuron system, because of its capacity to match the seen/heard gesture or vocalization with internal motor representations, allowed the observer/listener to assign a meaning to these new vocal–gesture combinations" (p. 140).

It is important to highlight that both the gesture-first account and the multimodal perspective are compliant with the action-orient paradigm. In fact, in both cases, the core idea is that language is grounded in bodily sensory-motor systems; it is not a coincidence that both perspectives assign a crucial explicative role for the rise of language to mirror neurons. The difference between the two accounts lies in the degree of importance conferred to the vocal mode of expression. According to the gesture-first account, during the early stages of language evolution, vocalizations were simply an accompaniment to gesticulation, which unfold the primary communicative function. From the view of the multimodal perspective, vocalizations and gesticulation were functionally equivalent from the beginning, both being necessary for the whole communicative process.

To conclude, the study of the evolution of the expressive modality from an action-oriented perspective offers an illuminating example of how collecting and synthesizing data from a broad range of disciplines has been possible when examining, in a scientific and systematic way, a subject that is crucial for understanding the origins of linguistic communication.

4 Deep Link Between Action, Social Cognition and Language

So far, we have discussed how the contribution of the action-oriented model of language has shifted the emphasis on the role of gesture in the origin of human communication. In this section, we will consider further crucial implications of assuming such action-oriented model. After considering the idea that action contributes to the making of the communicative expressive system, we now turn our attention to a different but strictly connected topic: the possible role of the embodied perspective in the explanation of the processes of language comprehension and production. How do the embodied models raise the issue of the interpretative level of language? In this regard, a further aspect distinguishing the embodied models from the syntactic-centric models emerges. As is well known, models that are guided by UG focus on the sentence constituent structure. This generates as consequence an “internalist” perspective in which the study of language coincides with the analysis of the rules governing the combination of symbols in the construction of the sentence. On the contrary, the embodied models are characterized by a focus on the relation between language and the external reality, specifically on how language might be grounded in the world (in this respect, the reference to grasping as basic condition for the emergence of language is illustrative; see Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998 ). Namely, whereas the biolinguistic models of language addressed the interpretative processes with reference to the combinatorial aspect of relating sound and arbitrary referents, now the embodied models shift the focus to the issue of grounding.

From this point of view, providing a comprehensive explanation of language means providing an explanation of how linguistic expressions are linked to external reality, ultimately it means understanding what meaning itself really is—the so-called “grounding problem” (Harnad 1990 ). This problem relates to what Chomsky ( 1966 ) defined as “Descartes’ problem” or the creative aspect of language use: how linguistic expressions can be appropriate to circumstances not being caused by them. Even though Chomsky ( 1964 ) states that “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (pp. 7–8), he considers the problem of appropriateness an unsolvable mystery. Indeed, the Chomskyan perspective can offer indications about how symbols relate to each other within the linguistic system but cannot account for how concepts emerge and relate to entities outside the system (see for a discussion Ferretti and Adornetti 2014 ). Much of the mystery clearly depends on the priority assigned to the syntactic plan. The grounding problem demands a link between language and reality that the syntactic-centric theories—defining language with reference to abstract, amodal, and arbitrary symbols combined by syntactic rules—are not equipped to address. The incompatibility between syntax and grounding calls for an inversion of paradigm. Can the action-oriented perspective, emphasizing the priority of grounding, embody such an inversion of paradigm?

By identifying the roots of language in the interaction between agents and environment, the framework of embodiment offers an approach to solving the symbol grounding problem, starting from a deep focus on the role of context (see Sect.  2 ). This focus strongly reframes the definition of symbol , here viewed as a structural coupling between an agent’s sensorimotor activations and its environment (Vogt 2002 ). To this extent, the question of appropriateness to the context is seen as a general problem concerning appropriateness of action to the ecological environment. The embodied account solves this latter problem of producing contextually appropriate behaviors taking into account a brain organized in terms of goal-directed motor acts (Rizzolatti et al. 2000 ). As pointed out by Glenberg and Gallese ( 2012 ), appealing to the “neural re-use” hypothesis (see Sect.  3 ), “the brain takes advantage of the solution of one different problem, namely contextually appropriate action, to solve another difficult problem, namely contextually appropriate language” (p. 911). This represents a completely different approach compared to that offered by the biolinguistic paradigm. If the issue of creativity of language use remained a mystery within that paradigm, the embodied perspective places critical constraints on the construction of meaning, starting from the primary constraints endemic to effective action. Given these constraints, the model can provide an account of how meaning emerges within a deep coupling between agent and context. Specifically, meanings are viewed as grounded through simulation in concrete experiences.

One area where the embodied approach has provided a fruitful contribution to language grounding is that of lexicon. Such a contribution has been particularly fostered by the mirror system hypothesis (for a review, see Arbib et al. 2014 ). As we have shown in Sect.  3 , according to this hypothesis, the mechanisms that originally evolved for action control have been exploited for language processing (Glenberg and Gallese 2012 ). More specifically, a “mirror for actions” system—concerned with both generating an action appropriate to the object’s affordances and recognizing the action being performed by another individual—provided the evolutionary basis for the emergence of a “mirror for words and constructions” system. In this way, the mirror system allows for complex imitation to be transferred from manual skills to a new communicative domain. The link between action-perception circuits and merging of circuits into higher-order ones makes a direct association between meaning and motor acts on one side and between meaning and object representations on the other. The master role played by the interplay between action-supporting regions of the brain to the emergence of semantics (e.g., Pulvermüller et al. 2014 ) provides a bottom-up account of language that is grounded in sensory-motor representation.

So far so good. The embodied approach presents itself as an option alternative to the biolinguistic program. The shifting in perspective towards embodiment has shown that alternative models of language referring to properties very different from those considered by biolinguistics are possible. Providing an action-based model of cognition that founds linguistic information on the grounding of symbols through the agent’s interaction with the environment, the embodied account goes in the desirable direction of building a different model of language compared to UG. Moreover, as it suggests that the supposedly high processes might be reframed in terms of a constituent contribution provided by low processes intrinsically linked to the domain of action, the embodied account offers a model of language that has a strong evolutionary plausibility.

That said, when it comes to the definition of language provided within the embodied perspective, two difficulties emerge, both involving the issue of language origins. The first difficulty concerns the priority assigned to lexicon. In terms of the origins, approaches centered on the rule of atomic elements are the most intuitive, carried out by scholars such as Bickerton ( 1990 ). However, the lexical protolanguage models are also very problematic. As emphasized by Fitch ( 2010 ), they presuppose an infrastructure for speech founded on vocal imitation and a capacity for referential communication that are not well thematized in approaches of this kind, leaving important evolutionary problems open. The second difficulty regards the fact that, after emphasizing the importance of grounding, embodied approaches (unlike biolinguistics) cannot count on a model of language fortified by > 50 years of thinking. When called upon to deal with defining what they mean by language , in fact, several scholars relating to embodied cognition have offered a definition that, quite unexpected, coincides with that of Chomsky: Glenberg and Gallese ( 2012 , p. 910), for example, defined language as “a productive system in that a finite number of words and syntactic rules can be used to generate an infinite number of sentences.” The emphasis on syntax is further underlined by the agenda for the future proposed by the embodied perspective; that is, explaining a motor theory of syntax for truly a theory of language (Caruana and Borghi 2016 ). Clearly, that of bringing together biolinguistics and embodiment is a legitimate program. However, such an option incurs the risk of leading again to a model of language that undermines the strong distinctions existing between the two paradigms. An alternative option is that, starting from the centrality of grounding, the action-oriented perspective paves the way to a different model of language. Indeed, if embodiment identifies the issue of grounding as a central tenet of its proposal and acknowledges meaning as a function of language use more than language per se (Evans 2006 ), more than focusing on the combinatorial aspects of language, it is reasonable to turn attention to models of language that stress the notion of anchoring to the context. What direction to take to combine an action-oriented perspective with a model addressing the issue of language origins, starting from notions such as that of context? It is our claim that, as a result of its features, the embodied approach has deep similarities with a pragmatic-based model of language—centered on a definition of language in terms of use more than in terms of grammatical competence.

Such a theory stating that language should be explained with reference to a strong pragmatic notion of context is the ostensive–inferential model of communication (OIMC) or relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986 / 1995 ). Starting from the well-known Gricean philosophical account of communication (Grice 1975 ), OIMC has been corroborated by cognitive data that attest to the plausibility of a communicative model centered on the role of context and intentionality (Scott-Phillips 2014 ; Sperber and Wilson 1986 / 1995 ). Within the OIMC the notion of intentional communication becomes a topic of central concern. Then how is the role of such notions framed within the OIMC? According to the model, a linguistic interaction is characterized by the speaker’s meaning, a complex communicative intention aimed to achieve a certain effect on the hearer’s mind by means of the hearer’s recognition of the intention to achieve this effect. In these terms, pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise of mindreading, with speakers trying to use the right sort of evidence to allow the audience to determine a contextually appropriate interpretation of linguistic expressions. This way of interpreting communication broadens the perspective on the notion of context. Pragmatics is not just elaborating the contextually appropriate actions in a physical environment; it also means solving problems related to the social context. From this point of view, the social-cognitive infrastructure underlying engagement with other minds represents a major crux in the investigation of language as well as its origins and evolution (e.g., Dunbar 1998 ; Origgi and Sperber 2000 ; Scott-Phillips 2014 ; Tomasello 2008 ). In fact, the focus on the role of mindreading as a precondition for the phylogenetic development of language is at the heart of much current work (e.g., Scott-Phillips 2014 ; Origgi and Sperber 2000 ). In this regard, we do have a robust theory of language alternative to that proposed by the biolinguistic program and conforms to evolutionary theory that takes into account the pragmatic aspect of language.

Although there are no models available allowing us to explicitly deal with the relation between embodiment and OIMC, we have some interesting indications suggesting that such a kind of relation might be fruitfully considered the agenda for the future of both the embodied perspective and the OIMC. At least two considerations are in favor of this claim. First, such a relation might provide the action-oriented perspective with a robust model of language (as robust as the Chomskyan theory) considering that to date the major limitation of this perspective is exactly the lack of a model of this kind. Further, combining embodiment with OIMC might be also fruitful for the relevance account that, although reconsidering the pragmatic aspects related to context, at least at the level of cognitive architectures is deeply tied to classical computationalism. Given the importance assigned to it within OIMC, theory of mind might be an example in this respect. The embodied perspective allows to rethink important aspects of theory of mind starting from a different angle compared to the ostensive perspective. The metapsychological device considered within the relevance account as a high-level cognitive mechanism (Sperber and Wilson 2002 ) can be reframed in terms of the more basic system of mindreading. Such a shift in perspective is founded on the claim that perception–action systems are mechanisms devoted to regulating not just the intentional action control but also the shaping of social interactions (Gallese et al. 2002 ; Fusaroli et al. 2012 ). Neurocognitive literature has provided strong evidence in support of these intersubjective bases of embodied cognition (e.g., Galantucci and Sebanz 2009 ), showing that mirror neurons can serve a self-other matching function (e.g., Gallese 2009 ); they are involved in coupling observation and execution of goal-related motor actions responding both when an action is performed and when the same action, performed by another individual, is simply observed (Gallese and Goldman 1998 ). The idea that similar intercorporeal matching mechanisms ground our connectedness to others is related to their functional role, that is, embodied simulation or motor resonance. Embodied simulation implies the mutual resonance of intentionally sensory-motor behaviors. Neuroscientific evidence shows that it is mediated by the activation of the same brain regions underlying our own sensory experiences (Gallese et al. 2004 ). In this perspective, the association of observed behaviors with a reactivation of our own body states is a way to recognize and understand those behaviors according to motor vocabulary mapping actions and representations (Rizzolatti and Luppino 2001 ). This common motor vocabulary guarantees a degree of congruence between the action repertoires of different individuals, a similarity of brain schemas when they interact. The notion of embodied simulation based on the immediate understanding of other’s actions lies at the core of the so-called motor account of social cognition. From this account follows the idea that mirroring other people’s actions is a way to directly comprehend their minds (Blakemore and Decety 2001 ). Indeed, if observing other’s actions allows for interpreting them as if they were one’s own, then it is possible to infer what motivated those actions and the intentions of the actor who performed them (Goldman 2006 ).

To this extent, the motor account of social cognition could provide a suitable alternative hypothesis about the nature of mindreading and its resulting role in language origins and evolution. As the mirror system is implicated in capturing intentions via action simulation, mindreading could be considered as playing a putative role in the pragmatic function of inferring communicative intentions (Cosentino 2014 ). Thus, the basic sensory-motor system would represent the key to pragmatics, as it implements the mental simulation of others’ actions, giving rise to expectations that provide direct comprehension of intentions, regardless of the explicit attribution of propositional attitudes (Glenberg and Gallese 2012 ). This is a simulative theory of comprehension based on the claim that the sensory-motor system provides a brain that is not only a brain that acts , but it is first of all a brain that understands (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008 ). If perceiving and acting pass through comprehension, then the building of a we-centric space underpinned by embodied simulation (Gallese 2009 ) is a bridge to meaning. From an evolutionary point of view, these considerations are particularly relevant as they pave the way to the idea that embodiment has a crucial role in meaning-making processes within a social-situated interaction (Arbib and Rizzolatti 1997 ; Gilissen 2005 ; Tettamanti et al. 2005 ). Moreover, the metapsychological complex levels of mindreading involved in communication can be framed as readjustments of the early basic sensory-motor skills. The process of reading each other’s minds is driven by the same sequence schema representation active in both communicative partners, allowing them to predict and understand each other’s actions, giving rise to meaning. Meaning is considered as a context-bound phenomenon that emerges in the context of embodied social action.

Based on the considerations made in this paper, the effort to bring together embodied theory of cognition with a pragmatic approach to communication represents the most fruitful way to build a model of language that meets the conformity constraint. Rather than stressing the necessity to hold embodiment and syntax together, future challenges might concern working on the contact points between embodiment and the OIMC. This could represent a line of investigation that, along with the challenge of providing more solid explanations of how simulation is a constituent component of language processing, might provide a paradigm of interest for understanding how the intertwined dimension of action, perception, and intersubjectivity might be involved in language origins and evolution.

5 Present Issue

This special issue provides an interdisciplinary view on contemporary language evolution research. It opens with two articles, those of Nathalie Gontier and Francesco Suman, which address epistemological issues concerning the relation between theory of evolution and language origin research. Considering the theory of evolution as the starting point of the investigation (following what, in this article, we have called the “conformity constraint”), both papers show how the conceptual assumptions of the theory of evolution affect and can fruitfully inform the study of language phylogeny. Gontier suggests how an applied evolutionary epistemological approach can help evolutionary linguistics at individuating the units, levels, and mechanisms of language evolution. Suman shows, within the framework of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, how factors such as niche construction, inclusive inheritance, phenotypic plasticity, and developmental constraints are relevant for conceptualizing the evolution of language: all these factors highlight the crucial role of the relationship between organisms and their environment for the origin of linguistic abilities.

The analysis of the genetic and phenotypic preconditions underlying language evolution is also the focus of the contribution from Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Constantina Theofanopoulou, and Cedric Boeckx. The authors hypothesize that genetic changes that have led to globularization of the braincase, and the processes responsible for the emergence of the (self-)domestication in our species (the fact that humans share many of the typical characteristics of domesticated species, such as reduced skeletal and cranial robusticity, changes in dentition, retention of juvenile characteristics, etc.) are closely related phenomena, and both have contributed to the appearance of natural languages.

Andrea Parravicini and Telmo Pievani present three different and historically recurrent approaches to the evolution of language: “evolution-free discontinuity” (the early version of UG model), “gradual evolutionary continuity” (the compatibilist model of UG elaborated by Pinker and Bloom 1990 ), and “punctuationist evolutionary approach” (the minimalist version of UG). The two authors present the main concepts of these approaches and discuss the limitations of each.

Ian Tattersall reconstructs the origin of linguistic capacity within a paleoanthropological and archaeological framework, assuming UG as model of language. The author hypothesizes that the neural capacity for language was acquired with the emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, but that this new potential was not exploited until about 100,000 years later, through processes of exaptation and emergence. In proposing this hypothesis, Tattersall adheres to the idea that was a single, short-term event that led to the rise of human language.

A different scenario is outlined by Michael Corballis in his contribution. The author advocates the idea that developmental changes that led to language probably took place gradually during the Pleistocene epoch, rather than as a sudden event in the evolution of Homo sapiens . The author examines both the evolution of the cognitive capacities underlying language and the unfolding of the communicative sensory modality. Concerning the first point, Corballis focuses on two specific properties of linguistic communication: generativity and the ability to understand the thoughts of others. He suggests that such properties have precursors in the cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals. Regarding the question of the evolution of the expressive code (in line with the action-oriented paradigm we have described in this paper) he proposes a gestural account in which a crucial role is assigned to pantomime.

The role of pantomime in language evolution is also the topic of the article by Przemysław Żywiczyński, Slawomir Wacewicz, and Marta Sibierska. The authors start from the observation that there is not a commonly accepted definition of “pantomime” in language evolution research, although many scholars have hypothesized a pantomimic stage in phylogenetic processes that have led to human communication. For this, after reviewing different areas of investigations (e.g., theatre studies, semiotics, neuroscience), they offer an expanded definition of pantomime , bringing out its nonconventional, motivated, and multimodal nature.

Another contribution that focuses on communicative sensory modality from an action-oriented perspective is that of Antonella Tramacere and Richard Moore. The authors deal with a specific issue characterizing the gestural theories: the relation between imitation, mirror neurons, and social learning. Relying on data coming from neuroscience, primatology, and archaeology, Tramacere and Moore suggest that while gestural communication played a crucial role in language evolution, the grounds for thinking that manual imitation also did are currently unconvincing.

Finally, the last two articles of the special issue adhere to a pragmatic model of language and address two important issues in this regard: the evolution of cooperative communication and the emergence of informative categories, such as topic and presupposition. Richard Moore analyses the evolutionary plausibility of Gricean cooperative model of communication. Against the idea that cooperative communication presupposes intentional action and abilities of joint action, the author advocates a bottom-up hypothesis according to which the abilities and motivations for joint and intentional action might be acquired through participation in communicative interaction. Based on the debate of the nature of protolanguage, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri and Viviana Masia suggest that presuppositions and topics, which are entrusted to a form of automatic processing, might have been developed to improve language ergonomics by sparing processing effort on some utterance contents.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Przemysław Żywiczyński and Sławomir Wacewicz for giving us the opportunity to host Protolang4 conference. We also thank the scholars who agreed to act as anonymous referees and the general editor of Topoi , Fabio Paglieri.

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Cosmic Lab, Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts, Roma Tre University, Via Ostiense 234, 00146, Rome, Italy

Francesco Ferretti, Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera & Serena Nicchiarelli

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For the specific concerns of the Italian Academy, we specify that: FF wrote Sect.  1 ; IA wrote Sects.  3 and 5 ; AC wrote Sect.  4 ; EC wrote Sect.  2 ; SN wrote Sect.  4 .

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Ferretti, F., Adornetti, I., Chiera, A. et al. Introduction: Origin and Evolution of Language—An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Topoi 37 , 219–234 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9560-6

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1 The Origins and the Evolution of Language

Salikoko S. Mufwene is Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and on the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. His current research is on language evolution, including the indigenization of English and other colonial European languages worldwide. He is the author of The Ecology of Language Evolution (Cambridge University Press 2001), Créoles , Écologie Sociale , Évolution Linguistique (l’Harmattan 2005), and Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change (Continuum Press 2008); and the (co-)editor of Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties (UGA Press 1993) and African American English: Structure, History and Use (Routledge 1998). He edits the book series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact .

• Published: 01 July 2013
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This chapter is a selective comparative and critical survey of speculations/hypotheses, since Antiquity, on the phylogenetic emergence of language in mankind. It highlights topics and explanations that have been recurring, how some of them have been refined and/or enriched by modern thinking about hominin evolution since Charles Darwin’s account of the process by natural selection under specific ecological pressures. It also shows how some questions have been shaped by the manifold evolution of linguistics itself since the nineteenth century, including variation on what counts as language, and by intellectual exchanges between linguistics and other disciplines such as primatology, neurology, and paleontology. It concludes with an itemization of accomplishments, after articulating a long list of question-begging accounts and still unanswered questions.

1.1 Introduction 1

Although ‘language evolution’ is perhaps more commonly used in linguistics than ‘evolution of language’, I stick in this chapter to the latter term, which focuses more specifically on the phylogenetic emergence of language. The former, which has prompted some linguists such as Croft ( 2008 ) to speak of ‘evolutionary linguistics’, applies also to changes undergone by individual languages over the past 6,000 years of documentary history, including structural changes, language speciation, and language birth and death. There are certainly advantages in using the broader term, especially to uniformitarians who argue that some of the same evolutionary mechanisms are involved in both the phylogenetic and the historical periods of evolution. For instance, natural selection driven by particular ecological pressures putatively applies in both periods, and social norms emerge by the same principle of the ‘invisible hand’ or ‘self-organization’ (e.g. Hurford 2006 , Mufwene 2008 ). However, I focus here only on phylogenetic evolution.

In this chapter I provide a selective history, since antiquity, of this complex but still largely speculative topic which, over the past two decades alone, has prompted numerous publications and has aroused much controversy among linguists and informative exchanges between them, primatologists, psycholinguists, anthropologists, neurolinguists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and computational linguists. This intellectual engagement has been in sharp contrast with most of the twentieth century, during which linguists appear to have abided by the the Société de Linguistique de Paris' 1866 ban on discussing the subject at its meetings. It appears also to have resurrected several positions by—and controversies among—especially eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophers and philologists. I show below that the differences between the two periods lie especially in the stronger empirical foundations of some recent hypotheses, and in the realization by their authors of the need for interdisciplinary scholarship.

My discussion is organized around the following questions (which do not necessarily determine the section structure of the chapter):

Was language given to humans by God or did it emerge by Darwinian evolution?

From a phylogenetic perspective, did language emerge abruptly or gradually? If the emergence of language was protracted, what plausible intermediate stages can be posited and what would count as evidence for positing them? Assuming that the structure of modern languages is modular, would gradual evolution apply to any of the modules, only to some of them, or only to the overall architecture? What is the probable time of the emergence of the first real ancestor of modern language?

Does possessing Language, the non-individuated construct associated exclusively with humans, presuppose monogenesis or does it allow for polygenesis? How consistent is either position with paleontological evidence about the evolution of the Homo genus? How did linguistic diversity start? Assuming Darwinian (variational rather than transformational) evolution, can monogenesis account for typological variation as plausibly as polygenesis?

What is the chronological relationship between communication and language? What light does this distinction shed on the relation between sign(ed) and spoken language? Did some of our hominin ancestors communicate by means of ape-like vocalizations and gestures? If so, how can we account for the transition from them to phonetic and signed languages? And how can we account for the fact that modern humans have favoured speaking over signing? Assuming that language is a communication technology, to what extent are some of the structural properties of languages consequences of the linearity imposed by the phonic and signing devices used in their architecture?

Is the evolution of language more biological than cultural? Or is it the other way around, or equally both? Are languages as cultural artifacts deliberate inventions or emergent phenomena? Who are the agents in the emergence of language: individuals or populations, or both?

What is the relationship between language and thought? Did these entities co-evolve or did one cause the other?

Is there such a thing as ‘language organ’ or ‘biological endowment for language’? How can it be characterized relative to modern humans' anatomical and/or mental makeups? What are the anatomical, mental, and social factors that facilitated the emergence of language?

Can we learn something about the evolution of language from historical language change, especially from the emergence of creoles and pidgins? Can we learn something from child language and/or from home sign language? And what can be learned from ‘linguistic apes’? Does it make sense to characterize these particular communicative ‘systems’ as fossils of the human protolanguage (cf. e.g. Bickerton 1990 )? In the same vein, what can modelling contribute to understanding the evolution of language. This is definitely the kind of thing that scholars could not do before the twentieth century; it is important to assess its heuristic significance.

As noted by Kirby ( 2007 ), the subject matter of the origins and evolution of language is very complex. It lies at the intersection of several academic disciplines and requires an interdisciplinary approach. I have listed all the above questions, which are still but a subset of the larger range of questions one can address in a book, so that the reader may empathize with the daunting task I have accepted in writing this synopsis, and appreciate the synthetic approach I adopt in focusing on noteworthy positions and issues, aiming at the big picture. Unfortunately, this strategy entails omitting many equally relevant references, aside from forcing me to be topically selective. The positions of the scholars I discuss may not even be presented in their entirety, due largely to space limitations. More interested readers are encouraged to read recent publications such as Fitch ( 2010 ) and Hombert and Lenclud (in press) for complementary and/or alternative accounts. I must also apologize for focusing exclusively on Western scholarship, which reflects my embarrassing ignorance of the other traditions. I will seek no excuse for the fact that European colonial expansion, which has shaped me intellectually, has generally downplayed what we could be learning from the other scholarly traditions.

1.2 A Historical Synopsis

Speculations about the origins of language and linguistic diversity date from far back in the history of mankind. Among the most cited cases is the book of Genesis, in the Judeo-Christian Bible. After God created Adam, He reportedly gave him authority to name every being that was in the Garden of Eden. Putatively, God and Adam spoke some language, the original language, which some scholars have claimed to be Hebrew, the original language of Bible. Adam named every entity God wanted him to know; and his wife and descendants accordingly learned the names he had invented.

Although the story suggests the origin of naming conventions, it says nothing about whether Adam named only entities or also actions and states. In any case, it suggests that it was necessary for Adam's wife and descendants to learn the same vocabulary to facilitate successful communication.

Up to the eighteenth century, reflecting the impact of Christianity, pre-modern Western philosophers and philologists typically maintained that language was given to mankind, or that humans were endowed with language upon their creation. Assuming that Eve, who was reportedly created from Adam's rib, was equally endowed with (a capacity for) language, the rest was a simple history of learning the original vocabulary or language. Changes needed historical accounts, grounded in natural disasters, in population dispersals, and in learning with modification, to which I return below.

The book of Genesis also deals with the origin of linguistic diversity, in the myth of the Tower of Babel (11: 5–8), in which the multitude of languages is treated as a form of punishment from God. According to the myth, the human population had already increased substantially, generations after the Great Deluge in the Noah's Ark story. To avoid being scattered around the world, they built a city with a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, the dwelling of God. The tower apparently violated the population structure set up at the creation of Adam and Eve. God brought them down (according to some versions, He also destroyed the tower), dispersed them around the world, and confounded them by making them speak in mutually unintelligible ways. Putatively, this is how linguistic diversity began. 2 The story suggests that sharing the same language fosters collaboration, contrary to some of the modern Darwinian thinking that joint attention and cooperation, rather than competition, facilitated the emergence of language (see e.g. Tomasello 2008 ).

Another story often reported in linguistics is the following:

According to Herodotus ( Histories 2.2) Pharaoh Psammetichus I [also known as Psamtik, of the 26th dynasty, seventh century bc ] wanted to determine the oldest nation and establish the world's original language. For this purpose, he ordered two children to be reared by a shepherd, forbidding him to let them hear a single word, and charging him to report the children's first utterance. After two years, the shepherd reported that on entering their chamber, the children came up to him, extending their hands, calling bekos . Upon enquiry, the pharaoh discovered that this was the Phrygian word for ‘wheat bread’, after which the Egyptians conceded that the Phrygian nation was older than theirs. ( Wikipedia , Jan. 2011)

The story may be interpreted to suggest monogenesis, according to which a single language was the ultimate ancestor of all modern languages. This would correspond to a protolanguage, such as proto-Bantu or proto-Indo-European, in genetic linguistics. However, this is not the theme we find in Plato's Cratylus , which focuses on how the first words emerged (in Greek). According to the dialogue with two disciples, Cratylus and Hermogenes, Socrates (the teacher and Plato's mouthpiece) claims that names originally captured the essence of the entities they denote; transmission from generation to generation has affected their transparency, making them (rather) opaque, reducing them to conventional, arbitrary signs. Opaqueness is accordingly more obvious in words borrowed from other languages, then considered ‘barbarous,’ especially since their roots are harder to trace. Socrates' comparison of the putative initial baptismal practice with the work of a painter makes his account a precursor of modern synesthetic approach, as he associates particular sounds with specific meanings. He thus anticipated some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philologists who saw the origins of language in ‘natural sounds’ produced by animals and other entities in nature.

Anticipating Johann Gottfried Herder, Socrates rejects the hypothesis that names had divine origins because, according to him, they are so imperfect that they could not have been made by the gods. The Cratylus is also one of the earliest works that associate language change with imperfect learning and language contact. The latter phenomenon complicates the evolutionary trajectories of particular languages, which, in contemporary metalanguage, need not be considered as unilinear.

Recently, the significance of population movements and language contacts in the evolution and diversification of languages has been underscored especially by Cavalli-Sforza ( 2000 ). Assuming that the exodus of Homo sapiens sapiens out of East Africa was protracted, he argues that some of the later migrant populations came in contact with earlier ones. Though he says nothing about monogenesis vs polygenesis, the idea appears to be that the original language changed as human populations migrated away from the homeland. Later contacts between the dispersing populations produced even more changes. No more reason other than population dispersal is given for the change, which is also problematic in typical accounts of speciation in language families such as Bantu and Indo-European.

The dominant trend in genetic linguistics, which inspired Cavalli-Sforza ( 2000 ) but had been disputed by Trubetzkoy ( 1939 ), has indeed been for monogenesis, positing a protolanguage from which all the members of a language family can be derived. This account of the evolution of language has also been adopted in particular by Ruhlen ( 1994 ), who attempted to reconstruct the ultimate phylogenetic protolanguage since Homo sapiens , on the model of proto-Indo-European or proto-Bantu. This ‘protolanguage,’ identified by some as ‘proto-world,’ should not be confused with the ‘protolanguage’ (without a hyphen) posited by Bickerton (e.g. 1990) and discussed below.

Writing in the first century bc , the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus questioned one particular brand of monogenesis that is not necessarily Adamic:

[…] to think that one individual then distributed names to things and that humans learned the first words from him is absurd. For why would he be able to mark everything with utterances and emit different sounds of the tongue, and at the same time others not being capable of having done it? Besides, if others too had not used their voices with one another, from where was the notion of utility implanted, and from where was this power first granted to him, to know what he wanted to do and conceive of it in his mind? Similarly, one person could not have prevailed and forced so many to want to learn the names of things so thoroughly […] (Lucretius Carus 2003 [?54 bc ]: ll. 1041–51).

Lucretius thereby suggests that language emerged and evolved from the collective communicative acts of individuals interacting with each other. We may, in modern terms, think of different interactants innovating on different occasions and the successful innovations being copied by others. This is the position articulated by Michel Bréal in the late nineteenth century (see below), in contrast with the vast majority of scholars who have simply ignored the question.

There doesn't seem to have been much speculation on the origins of language since Lucretius until the eighteenth century, ‘the (Age of) Enlightenment.’ The contribution of the Renaissance period appears to be negligible, as the focus was on (the logic of) the structure of language, epitomized by the Port-Royal Grammar, published in 1660 by Claude Lancelot and Antoine Arnauld. It's not evident what the reason for this return to the subject matter of the origins of language was, except perhaps that the post-Renaissance social philosophers, so interested in defending the natural rights of people and freeing fellow citizens from superstition and the creationist dogma of Christianity, may have wanted also to have a better understanding of the origins of mankind. Convinced that rationality distinguishes mankind from other animals, they were interested in the apparent chicken-and-egg connection between humans' mental capacity and language.

A name that was particularly influential in the eighteenth century was Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who, according to Aarsleff ( 1982 ), then launched debates on the origins of language with his Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines ( 1746 ). He argued that language is a consequence of humans' being rational and needing this tool to express their thoughts. Although he saw language as constrained by its phonetic architecture to linearize thought, he also claimed that language gives more structure to thought processes and is the foundation of (the growth of) human knowledge. This sounds similar to Bickerton's (e.g. 1990 ) claim that the emergence of language, especially syntax, enhanced human capacity for thought (see below). 3

Contrary to the received doctrine of the Catholic Church, the dominant one at his time, Condillac, an abbot, concluded that language was man-made, the product of humans' capacity for creative thought, and not God-given, a position adopted by other eighteenth century philosophers. He is also reported to have contributed to, if not started, the hypothesis that language emerged from natural cries. Although it would be derided by Friedrich Max Müller in the nineteenth century (see below), this position addresses the question of how humans evolved from the mere production of ‘natural cries,’ identified today as holistic vocalizations, to phonetic ones, which Condillac characterized as ‘vocal signs,’ at least according to Aarsleff ( 1982 ). This is a question that still awaits a conclusive answer (see esp. Wray 2002 , Tallerman 2007 , and Bickerton 2010 ) and on which MacNeilage ( 2008 ) contributes some significant insights (see below).

The hypothesis that the original ancestor of language lies in the natural cries and gestures was also developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1755 essay on the origin of language, in Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes . For him, cries and gestures are the language most expressive of humans' passions, which dominated in the earliest phylogenetic stages of mankind. The evidence can allegedly still be found in ‘savage’ or less advanced populations, particularly in southerly, warmer climates, where humans are, according to him, closer to nature. It is not that those populations are still in the primordial or less evolved stages of human evolution,

the order of their progress is different. In southern climates, where nature is bountiful, needs are born of passion. In cold countries, where she is miserly, passions are born of need, and the languages, sad daughters of necessities, reflect their austere origin. ( 1755 ; Moran and Gode's translation, 1966 : 46)

According to Rousseau, the passions are still best expressed through tones (and intonation) and gestures, and thus in tonal languages. However, ‘while visible signs can render a more exact imitation, sounds more effectively arouse interest’ (Moran and Gode 1966 : 9), which is why, as communication became less and less passionate and more and more referential/rational, speech prevailed as a means of communication. Like most philosophers and philologists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau did not realize that tones play a contrastive lexical and/or grammatical function in many languages, although this is not the case in most European languages. On the other hand, like some modern students of the origins of language (e.g. Tomasello 2008 , MacNeilage 2008 , Corballis 2010 , Dor and Jablonka 2010 , Mufwene 2010b ), Rousseau also assumed that modern language emerged under social ecological pressures, especially out of the need to help each other understand what they had to do in order to survive danger (pp. 47–8). On the other hand, unlike today's scholars, Rousseau interpreted evolution as progress towards a more explicit architecture meant to express reason more than emotion. According to him,

Anyone who studies the history and progress of tongues will see that the more words become monotonous, the more consonants multiply; that, as accents fall into disuse and quantities are neutralized, they are replaced by grammatical combinations and new articulations. […] To the degree that needs multiply […] language changes its character. It becomes more regular and less passionate. It substitutes ideas for feelings. It no longer speaks to the heart but to reason. (Moran and Gode 1966 : 16)

Thus, Rousseau interpreted the evolution of language as gradual, reflecting changes in the Homo genus's mental, social, and environmental structures. He also suggests that consonants emerged after vowels (at least some of them), out of necessity to keep ‘words’ less ‘monotonous.’ Consonants would putatively have made it easier to identify transitions from one syllable to another. He speaks of ‘break[ing] down the speaking voice into a given number of elementary parts, either vocal or articulate [i.e. consonantal?], with which one can form all the words and syllables imaginable’ (p. 17). This account appears to anticipate Peter MacNeilage's notion of ‘syllabic variegation’ (see below).

Like his contemporaries and predecessors, Rousseau did not (always) distinguish sounds from the letters, but he also had curious positions about the latter. He associated pictographic writing with ‘a savage people, signs of words and propositions [with] a barbaric people, and the alphabet [with] civilized peoples’ (p. 17).

This stratification of populations was a common belief until the early twentieth century (see below). However, it is not out of place to discuss, in the context of the evolution of language and of writing systems as technology designed to overcome some of the shortcomings of speech and signing. Writing does not just extend our capacity to remember and carry to longer distances what was or could have been spoken or signed. For instance, Chinese ideograms are additionally efficient in enabling speakers of mutually unintelligible Sinitic language varieties to understand each other. In this particular respect, they also illustrate why evolution should not be thought of in rectilinear and unilinear terms, as there is room for variation. While alphabetic writing systems, designed to capture speech, may be preferred (by the principles of economy and productivity) for their simplicity, they cannot accomplish the role Chinese ideograms play in bridging dialectal differences with regard to meaning. Scholars who think of language as technology (Smith and Szathmáry 1999, Lee et al. 2009 , Mufwene 2010a ) will hail Rousseau for bringing writing as derivative technology into the picture. It's undoubtedly also relevant to ask to what extent writing has influenced language evolution during the historical period (Wang 2011 ).

Rousseau questioned the Adamic hypothesis on the origins of modern language, arguing that the language that God had taught Adam and was learned by the children of Noah perished after the latter abandoned agriculture and scattered. Modern language is therefore a new invention (Moran and Gode 1966 : 36). Rousseau may have been concerned more about the diversification of the language that Noah's children had spoken before they dispersed than about the origins of language itself. He assumed the speciation to have happened before the Tower of Babel explanation in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Language diversification is a topic that has not been sufficiently discussed in today's literature on the evolution of language(s). The focus has typically been language as a common endowment of all humans, thus obviating the question of whether the origins of modern languages were monogenetic or polygenetic. If they evolved ultimately from one language, was this original language internally variable or not? Accounts of how linguistic diversity emerged should vary, depending on whether one assumes monogenesis without internal variation or polygenesis with the possibility of variation from one hominin colony to another.

It is thus noteworthy that, unlike most of his contemporaries and somewhat anticipating variational evolutionary theory, Rousseau also addressed the question of the consequences of inter-idiolectal variation in the emergence of language as a communal phenomenon:

[E]ach individual is unique, possessed of, even in some ways identical with, his own nature or ‘essence’ while participating in the whole of nature, the whole of reality, so speak. In so far as there is plurality of individuals, and one individual (or group) practices any of the arts on others, there is a basis for contrasting nature (the nature of one) and art (the art of another). (Moran and Gode 1966 : 76)

In modern terms, every idiolect differs from others. This situation raises the interesting question of how they converge toward the same communal norm (Mufwene 2008 , 2010b ). Does normalization as emergence of a communal norm entail elimination, or just reduction, of variation? What does it really mean when two or more individuals are said to speak the same language? One should also ask: what role has inter-idiolectal variation played in the evolution of language?

A contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the German philologist Johann Gottfried Herder contributed to the debates on some of the above issues, with his Über den ursprung der Sprache (1772), translated and published in Moran and Gode ( 1966 ) as Essay on the origin of language (which is cited here). Herder especially argued that human language was not God-given, and that it started in animal communication (p. 94). Like Lucretius, he thought that even Hebrew, assumed then to be the oldest language, was too imperfect to be God's creation (pp. 94, 96), though he could have made allowance for change, which normally disturbs the original design, over time. Likewise, he observed:

Now trace, if you can, divine order in the fact that a god, who saw the plan of language as a whole, invented seventy words for the stone and none for all the indispensable ideas, innermost feelings, and abstractions, that in one case he drowned us in unnecessary abundance while leaving us in the other in the direst need which obliged us to steal and usurp metaphors and talk half nonsense, etc. (p. 153)

The distribution of the vocabulary within and across languages appeared to Herder to be too inconsistent for the latter to be God's creation(s). Like Rousseau, he concluded that such varying reality could only reflect the work of mankind.

Herder was ambivalent about the origins of language. On the one hand, he argued against Rousseau's and Condillac's position that it evolved from emotional cries (p. 102). On the other, he admitted that it may have started as animal-like cries, with the difference that human utterances in the form of speech are volitional and driven by reason (p. 99). He concludes several pages later that early human language ‘was an expression of the language of all creatures within the natural scale of the human voice’ (p. 137).

Herder also argued that knowledge of particular languages is not instinctive; the child learns the language of its social environment. Anticipating modern linguists, he clarified that what is being discussed is the capacity for language, what Ferdinand de Saussure referred to as the faculté de langage and generativists as Universal Grammar or biological endowment for language. He observed that this capacity, which is also shared by the deaf (p. 118), enables humans to learn naturalistically, through interactions or by immersion, whatever language they have been exposed to. This of course leaves unanswered the question of how in the first place this particular capacity for language evolved in mankind and in what form. It also leaves open the question of how particular languages displaying both structural diversity and common/universal features evolved (see below).

Herder also speculated that language started with the practice of naming. He claimed that predicates, which denote activities and conditions, were the first names; nouns were derived from them (pp. 132, 160). He thus partly anticipated Heine and Kuteva ( 2007 ), who argue that grammar emerged gradually, through the grammaticization of nouns and verbs into grammatical markers, including complementizers, which make it possible to form complex sentences. An issue arising from Herder's position is whether nouns and verbs could not have emerged concurrently. Not quite in the same way, Allan ( 2010a : 230) comments that Herder was more concerned with proving that ‘God could not have invented human language because, as the Western Classical Tradition affirms, the logical order is to name entities first and then predicate acts and attributes of them.’

On the other hand, as hypothesized by William Dwight Whitney (discussed below), the original naming practice need not have entailed the distinction between nouns and verbs and the capacity to predicate. At that time, naming may have amounted to pointing with (pre-)linguistic signs; predication may have started only after hominins were capable of describing states of affairs compositionally, combining word-size units in this case, rather than holophrastically. This issue cannot be addressed independently of what Bickerton's ( 1990 ) ‘protolanguage’ is and when it may have emerged. The question of the order in which other grammatical categories emerged remains open, there being no conclusive evidence in support of the particular order proposed by Heine and Kuteva ( 2007 ). In any case, Herder also argued that language was ‘the child of reason and society’ (p. 91). He thought that ‘vowels are the first, the most vital things, the hinges of language’ (p. 95), which appears to suggest evolution from primate-like vocalizations.

Another important philosopher of the eighteenth century was Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, author of Réflexions sur l'origine des langues et la vie des mots (1748). Among other things, he sought to answer the question of whether modern languages can ultimately be traced back to one single common ancestor or whether current diversity reflects polygenesis, with different populations developing their own languages. Associating monogenesis with the Tower of Babel myth, which needs a deus ex machina , God, to account for the diversification of languages, he rejected it in favour of polygenesis. Note, however, that his position needs Cartesianism, which assumes that all humans are endowed with the same mental capacity and suggests that our hominin ancestors could have invented similar communicative technologies at the same or similar stages of our phylogenetic evolution. This position makes it natural to project the existence of language as the common essence of languages beyond their differences. Saussure ( 1962 [1916] ) may be credited with similar thinking when he observed that le langage ‘language’ is heteroclitic, anterior to languages and more natural than them, and yet deriving its unity from the latter (pp. 25–26). These considerations provide the background for speaking of universals in the architecture of language and of (constraints on) parametric typological variation.

In the nineteenth century, scholarship on the origins of language was enriched with an alternative perspective. Charles Darwin commented in The Descent of Man (1871) that the evolution of language was in several ways reminiscent of that of mankind itself. He hypothesized that it had emerged gradually, had not been given by God or invented by design by humans, and could also be explained by natural selection. He was among the first to correlate the evolution of language with that of the human mind (see also Müller 1880 [1861] ), thus accounting for why parrots cannot produce original spoken messages intentionally, although they can imitate human speech fairly accurately. Showing what an important driver role the human mind has played in the evolution of language, he argued that it was for the same reason that other primates do not use their buccopharyngeal structure to speak.

We now know that Charles Darwin was only partly right. The other primates' buccopharyngeal structure is not shaped in exactly the same way as that of humans, although, based on the parrot's phonetic accomplishments, we must wonder how critical this particular structure was for the emergence of language (not speech!) in the first place. After all, humans who cannot speak produce signed language, which is just as adequate for communication. This argument may be claimed to support the position that the emergence of the capacity for language must be distinguished from the emergence of languages. However, one must also wonder whether the two questions can be considered independently of each other (see below).

On the other hand, like eighteenth-century philosophers, Charles Darwin also claimed that complex thought could not ‘be carried on without the aid of words.’ Many modern linguists doubt that the language of thought is structured just like spoken or signed language. It does not appear to be constrained by linearity (see below). In fact, in its most fundamental form it does not appear to depend on these communication media and is ontologically anterior to them. Just because the language of fundamental thought is probably structured differently, it does not follow that it is less complex than spoken or signed language. The evidence appears to be lacking regarding the role that speech and signing allegedly play in structuring human thinking. It seems so natural to claim that complex language evolved in response to the communicative needs of social minds that were becoming more and more complex.

Charles Darwin should be credited for subsuming the topic of language vitality, as it should be under the umbrella of language evolution (Mufwene 2001 , 2008 ). He paid attention to the spread of some languages at the expense of others, a topic that linguistics has dealt with recently under the heading of ‘language endangerment.’ However, he also thought of some populations and their languages as less evolved than others, although he did not establish any obvious correlation between the alleged less evolved populations and less evolved languages. This is a recurrent claim throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereby non-Europeans are often described as ‘savages’ and the position of their languages on a putative evolutionary trajectory as ‘primitive,’ simply because their morphologies are too complex (the case of agglutinating and polysynthetic languages), or they have no morphophonology (the case of isolating languages), and/or they are tonal. Though Charles Darwin also concluded that races are probably the counterparts of subspecies in biology, he was still a prisoner of the social prejudices of his time (Mufwene 2008 : ch. 6). His hypotheses on the evolution of language were thus tainted by them.

It is worth mentioning in this context the contribution that George Howard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and an accomplished astronomer and mathematician, made to the subject of the evolution of language. He defended his father and Dwight Whitney against Friedrich Max Müller, both of whose views are discussed below. In his essay titled ‘Professor Whitney on the Origin of Language’ (1874), George Darwin especially supported the idea that human language may have started from ‘the imitational and interjectional sources of [Aryan] roots,’ that the number of initial roots must have been very small at the early stages of true language and everything else developed later. He elaborates:

It is surely probable that many generations of quasi-men passed away, who used a small vocabulary of conventionalised cries, that these cries became more and more conventionalised, by departing more and more from the sounds of exclamations, from which they took their origin. Many roots would probably propagate themselves by fission, and give rise to new roots, gradually to become entirely separate from their onomatopoeic originals. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 288)

Max Müller had ridiculed as ‘bow-wow theory’ the hypothesis that human language had started from imitations of animal sounds, interjections, etc. In his essay titled ‘The theoretical stage and the origin of language’ (1861), Müller argues that what distinguishes humans from other animals is not so much speech but the ‘inward faculty which is called the faculty of abstraction, […] which is better known to us by the homely name of Reason.’ Against Charles Darwin's unjustified assertion that there are languages without abstract terms (of course spoken by ‘savages’), he observes that every (denoting?) word ‘contains a predicative root’ which ‘expresses a general concept’ (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 197). Against the ‘bow-wow theory,’ Müller argues that although there are interjections and onomatopoeic terms in every language, ‘as yet no language has been discovered that was so formed.’ According to him, ‘interjections are only the outskirts of real language,’ which begins where they end (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 23). Although it is conceivable that ‘some kind of language might have been formed’ based on onomatopoeias and interjection, it could not have been ‘a language like that which we find in numerous varieties among all races of men’ (p. 24).

In his 1873 ‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language,’ Müller is undecided about whether the roots emerged in a protracted fashion or all at the same time. His overall position raises the question of when grammar emerged in the phylogeny of human language and whether, in the first place, our hominin ancestors were capable of producing phonetic sounds at the time they developed the initial vocabulary. Nonetheless, the original roots evolved gradually into the vocabulary of modern spoken languages, some of them becoming grammatical terms, as argued today by Heine and Kuteva ( 2007 ). 4

On the other hand, Müller also thought that some languages are primitive and simpler, especially those with an isolating morphosyntax. Within the context of complexity/simplicity in language, this is fundamentally the thesis defended recently by McWhorter ( 1998 , 2001 ), according to whom creoles are not only young languages but also the world's simplest. According to the latter, creole ‘prototypes’ lack derivations, inflections, and tones, all being features that older languages have putatively acquired through much longer histories of evolution and accretion. Independent of the forceful and extensive rebuttal provided by DeGraff ( 2001 ), how ironical it is that, for reasons that are no sounder, much of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature on the evolution of language considered inflections and tones to be primitive features! As we will see soon in the discussion of Otto Jespersen's views, creoles could thus be considered more evolved than their European lexifiers and other languages.

Objecting to Charles Darwin's hypothesis that human languages, like different races of man, have evolved from a common ancestor, Müller ( 1873 ) states:

[B]ecause the merest tyro in anatomy knew that the different races of man constituted so many species, that species were the result of independent creative acts, and that the black, brown, red, yellow, and white races could not possibly be conceived as descended from one source. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 175)

This remark is reminiscent of objections made by some scholars such as Maine ( 1875 ) and Freeman ( 1881 , 1886 ) to Sir William Jones's 1786 hypothesis that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other Indo-European languages had all evolved ultimately from the same protolanguage, Proto-Indo-European. They thought that the Indians were too ‘barbaric’ to share genetic ancestry, racially and linguistically, with Europeans. Otherwise, Müller's objection conjures up the question of whether monogenesis and transformational evolution, as typically suggested in linguistics, can account adequately for the emergence of linguistic diversity, especially if no allowance is made for internal variation in the protolanguage à la Bickerton ( 1990 ). In this respect, modern linguists would be remiss to overlook the fact that Charles Darwin invoked natural selection as applying to variation which he assumed to obtain in any population (see below).

Müller thought that ‘collateral development’ (polygenesis) was more likely to account for some of the differences between dialects and languages. According to him, there is no reason why different individuals at different places and/or different times would have solved the same communicative challenges in identical ways, even when they are endowed with the same ‘instinct, gift, talent, faculty, proprium ’ for language (1873: 228–9). He was clearly not Cartesian! Nonetheless, he maintained that language was a means ‘for the formation of thought’ (pp. 231–2), oddly in agreement with Darwin in this case.

Müller was also strongly opposed to the hypothesis that humans are phylogenetically related to the great apes and monkeys. He concluded that Darwin must have been confused, ignoring the fact that human language is unattainable by other animals (p. 183). The question is whether this state of affairs is a consequence of Müller's suggestion that the great apes are not phylogenetically related to humans. One wonders what he would think of today's attempts to get some great apes to communicate with humans in approximations of sign language or with lexigrams, or even of claims that they understand speech.

Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Müller stipulated a distinction between ‘emotional language’ and ‘rational language.’ Accordingly, the former is something that humans share with animals and in which imitations of ‘natural cries’ fit, whereas the latter is the outer side of the mind and is unique to mankind. Müller was curious how one may account for the evolution from ‘emotional’ to the ‘rational language’ (1873: 225). This question has remained hard to answer, though one may suggest that our hominin ancestors may have started with modulating their vocalizations into sequences of contrasting syllabic peaks, thus producing different vowels. However, as discussed below, more was involved in the process; we need to learn from paleontology and other relevant disciplines about how we evolved mentally, anatomically, and socially from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens sapiens to be able to account adequately for the transition.

William Dwight Whitney responded to Müller in his article titled ‘Nature and Origin of Language’ (1875), by first articulating a distinction between the ‘capacity for language,’ with which every normal human is endowed, and ‘speech.’ The critical point is that the ‘capacity’ has made it possible for humans to develop language or learn whatever is spoken and/or signed in their social environment. This ‘capacity’ distinguishes mankind from animals, although, as recent findings about bird songs have made clear (e.g. Margoliash 2010 ), the observation should be mitigated (see below). Whitney argues that ‘the only conscious motive’ for developing language was communication, which is certainly at odds with Bickerton's ( 1990 ) claim that it was made to enhance human capacity for thought. Then he reformulates the ‘bow-wow theory’ as follows:

Spoken language began […] when a cry of pain, formerly wrung out by real suffering, and seen to be understood and sympathized with, was repeated in imitation, no longer as a mere instinctive utterance, for the purpose of intimating to another, ‘I am (was, shall be) suffering.’ (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 298)

Whitney thus saw the foundations of language in the intentional use of the cries and other sounds. Then he proceeded to address the question of how spoken language has emerged as the dominant mode of explicit communication in mankind:

[I]t is simply by a kind of process of natural selection and survival of the fittest that the voice has gained the upper hand, and come to be so much the most prominent that we give the name of language (‘tonguiness’) to all expression. There is no mysterious connection between the thinking apparatus and the articulating apparatus, whereby the action that forms a thought sets the tongue swinging to utter it. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 300)

As we shall see below, ‘natural selection’ is not much of an explanation if one does not mention the factors that influenced the resolution of the competition in this particular direction. On the other hand, like Charles Darwin, Whitney seems also influenced by the social prejudice of his time, as in the following passage that should not resonate well to speakers of tone languages:

[T]one, and still more gesture, has assumed the subordinate office of aiding the effectiveness of what is uttered. And the lower the intellectual condition of the speaker and the spoken-to, the more indispensable is the addition of tone and gesture. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 302)

The bias against non-Indo-Europeans is equally strong in the following passage:

An infinity of things can be said in English which cannot be said in Fijian or Hottentot; a vast deal, doubtless, can be said in Fijian or Hottentot which could not be said in the first human language. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 307)

A great deal can be said in Fijian, Hottentot, and other non-European languages that cannot be said in European languages either, just as there are things that can be said in English but cannot be readily expressed in French, for instance, and vice versa. Whitney also claimed that the earliest form of linguistic communication must have been holographic, consisting of one-word utterances, without a formal distinction between entities and actions; parts of speech and predication emerged later, and even later the combinations of words belonging in different lexical categories into complex utterances (Harris and Pyle 1966 : 306, 308). As noted above, this comes as an apt rejoinder to Herder's speculations, although, as with everything else, this must be verified by future research. Like his contemporaries, Whitney thought that inflectional or fusional languages represent a high level of ‘cultivation.’ However, he also thought of the evolution of language as the ‘accidental […] product of forces and circumstances so numerous and so indeterminable that we cannot estimate them and could not have predicted their result’ (pp. 312–13). In this respect, he is like today's emergentists, for whom evolution is largely driven by self-organization.

Several other scholars, many of them anonymous, published on the origins of language in the nineteenth century. One of the non-anonymous was the social anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor. In a 1866 paper titled ‘On the Origin of Language’, he attempted to support the ‘bow-wow theory’ by invoking the ways in which ‘savages’ in the colonies named the goods the Europeans brought, using words based on sounds associated with the goods. For instance, the Sea Islanders in the Pacific allegedly used pu for musket, puhi for ‘to blow’ (as they thought the European blew in the gun), puff for the smoke coming out of the musket, and pupuhi for the barrel of a gun. He concluded:

If several languages have independently chosen like words to express like sounds, then we may reasonably suppose we are not deluding ourselves in thinking that such words are highly appropriate to their purpose. Thus we have such forms as pu, puf, bu, buf recurring in the most remote and different languages with the meaning of blowing or puffing. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 91)

In a note, he illustrates his claim with the following list: ‘Tongan buhi , Mahjori pupui , Zulu pu , Hebrew puach &c.’ He likewise finds evidence for the common origin of language in the cross-linguistic similarities among words used for ‘father’ and ‘mother’, words which, according to him, vary more in their consonants than in their vowels (p. 95). It did not matter at all to him that some terms that are phonetically similar sometimes denote opposite entities. It is striking how nineteenth-century scholars really thought that the colonized populations were apparently less evolved anatomically and/or mentally and therefore may provide evidence for how language evolved. Nowadays, we have to deal with Bickerton's ( 1990 ) controversial claim that pidgins (typically those based on European languages) represent fossils of his ‘protolanguage.’

Nobody articulates the above thesis as explicitly as the Revd Frederic William Farrar, who, in his 1865 book Language and Languages , asserts:

Savage languages are […] the best to show us what must have been the primitive procedure; but we can trace the same necessary elements of words in languages far more advanced. (Harris and Pyle 1996 : 59)

Arguing that language is too imperfect to be God's creation, he also interpreted the multiplicity of languages as evidence that language is an invention of mankind, ‘developed by intelligence and thought. […] It may be unable to keep pace with the advancing power of abstraction, but it can never by any possibility anticipate or outstrip it’ (p. 45). He adduced evidence for humans' ability to invent languages from what is now known as ‘home sign language’ and from the ability of abandoned children living in groups to develop a language of their own (pp. 54–5). This evidence should actually be used to highlight the fact that, from an evolutionary perspective, the language phenomenon under discussion is a communal one, which does not emerge unless there is population of individuals, at least two, who interact with each other. (See also Lieberman 2006 : 354ff.) Unless a situation such as the Nicaraguan boarding school for the deaf arises, no particular communal sign language emerges from the practices of isolated home signers interacting only with their speaking relatives.

Not unlike Bickerton ( 1990 ) with pidgins and creoles, Farrar thought that the modifications of European languages in the colonies might shed light on how language evolved, just like the invention of ‘Argots’ by ‘the dangerous classes throughout Europe’ (Harris and Pyle 1966 : 66). According to him, because they are not intelligible to speakers of the languages from which they have evolved or been developed, they ‘must, from their very nature, remain uncultivated’ (p. 66). Although he assumed that language emerged gradually, he discussed the complexity of ‘savage languages’ in a way that reveals again strong prejudice against non-Europeans. This was indeed the century of ‘la mission civilisatrice’ or ‘the white man's burden’ ideologies developed by the French and the British respectively to justify exploitation colonization. Being non-European, isolating languages and, according to Farrar, also agglutinating and polysynthetic languages were deemed primitive. Putatively, the ‘apparent wealth of synonyms and grammatical forms is chiefly due to the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction ’ (Farrar's italics, p. 78). This would allegedly be obvious in languages that lack the copula. All such remarks that are undoubtedly offensive today, at least to some of us, underscore how cautious we must be in how we use our findings about some modern linguistic systems to make inferences about the evolution of language.

We should, of course, not ignore Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt, who conceived of language dynamically in terms of the ‘energeia’ that translates the ‘inner linguistic sense’ into the outer expression, in which the universe of experience is categorized differently from one community to another. He may be considered a forerunner of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. What is especially relevant to the study of the evolution of language (a topic on which Humboldt did not say much) is the individuality of the inner sense, which makes every idiolect different but also every dialect and every language different, as the dynamics leading to social norms vary from one community to another. Humboldt also claimed that different populations have not evolved identically in developing their linguistic individuality. He characterized the evolution of language as what Harris and Taylor ( 1989 : 177) paraphrase as ‘the continuous outcome of [the] dialectic between the inner linguistic sense and sound-form; that is, between energeia and ergon .’ Every individual speaker contributes to this process, as they reshape in not reproducing perfectly, the language of their social environment.

Then we must now ask how the different individuals, innovators and copiers, ultimately converge toward shared communal norms (Mufwene 2008 ). Note that invoking either the ‘invisible hand’ or ‘self-organization’ is simply admitting that we cannot yet articulate explicitly how the mutual accommodations that speakers/signers make to each other, in their ever-changing dyadic and triadic interactions, evolve to these ‘conventions.’ It is like saying that languages take on lives of their own when in reality the agents and hosts are the speakers or signers (Mufwene 2001 ). The conclusion does not take us farther than Saussure's 1916 correct observation that ‘la parole fait évoluer la langue’ (‘speech makes language evolve’), without explaining how it does it.

The foregoing gives us a representative canvas of the state of the art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerning the evolution of language. It also gives us a sense of the kinds of controversial speculation that led the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1866 to ban any linguistic discussions on the subject matter at its meetings. Only one more scholar is worth noting from the period, the semanticist Michel Bréal, who argued against the French ban on the ground that it impoverished the subject matter of linguistics. Bréal saw languages as being reshaped constantly by their speakers, and rejected his contemporaries' organic approach to them. He thought the approach was inaccurate in casting some languages not only as less evolved than others but also as decaying or dying. He would undoubtedly have opposed the present discourse about language birth, vitality, and endangerment, as well as about moribund languages, though it can be argued that languages conceived of as species (Paul 1880 , Mufwene 2001 ) are born and may die in the same protracted ways biological species do, unlike individual organisms (Mufwene 2008 : 208–9).

As noted above, the French ban appears to have been respected even outside France. It became almost taboo to discuss the evolution of language throughout most of twentieth century, until the 1990s, which I discuss in the next section . 5 Among the exceptions to the rule are the Dane Otto Jespersen, in his book Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922a) and the American Morris Swadesh, whose book Origin and Diversification of Language , written in 1967 but published posthumously in 1971, also changed the nature of the discourse.

Otto Jespersen's contributions to the study of the origins of language include his argument that the ‘bow-wow’ theory (claiming the origins of language in the imitation of sounds in nature), the ‘pooh-pooh’ theory (based on human interjections), and the ‘yo-he-yo’ theory (based on human sounds during collective physical work) need not dismissed offhand. ‘Each of the three chief theories enables one to explain parts of language but still only parts, and not even the most important parts—the main body of language seems hardly to be touched by any of them’ (1922a: 416).

A more important and relatively uncontroversial contribution of Jespersen's is his position that we can learn indirectly about the origins of language by focusing on infant language during the first year of what is still nonlinguistic interaction with the caretakers, focusing on its cooing, babbling, and gestures. Later scholars such as Tomasello ( 2008 ) have suggested the development of joint attention, observable in human infants but not in great apes, as an important determinative factor in the evolution of language. Babies' ability to take turns in vocalization games also appears to be evidence of joint attention.

Jespersen also advocated paying attention to trends in how human languages have evolved in documented history, though the conclusions he suggests are controversial. He points out that European languages such as English and French have evolved from more complex morphosyntax to simpler, analytic ones and from structures putatively harder to learn and full of irregularities to more regular and systematic ones. ‘The direction of the movement is toward flexionless languages (such as Chinese, or to a certain extent Modern English) with freely combinable elements’ (1922a: 425). If, like Jespersen, one adopted from the misguided nineteenth century the view that some languages and related populations are less evolved than others, this would not rank German (which Jespersen does not discuss in this context) very high on the scale, nor Basque, which he finds excuses for not lumping into the category of ‘primitive languages.’ His conclusion is that the initial language must have had forms that were more complex and non-analytic; modern languages reflect evolution toward perfection which must presumably be found in languages without inflections and tones. It is not clear what Jespersen's position on derivational morphology is. In any case, his views are at odds with Bickerton's ( 1990 ) hypothesis that the protolanguage, which allegedly emerged by the late Homo erectus , was much simpler and had minimal syntax, if any. While Bickerton sees in pidgins fossils of that protolanguage and in creoles the earliest forms of complex grammar that could putatively evolve from them, Jespersen would perhaps see in them the ultimate stage of the evolution of language to date. Many of us today find it difficult to side with one or the other position.

Rather outrageous is Jespersen's claim that languages of ‘savages’ in Africa and the Americas could inform us about the origins of language, not only because they have longer words (with complex morphology, 1922a: 421), but also because they use difficult sounds such as clicks and rely on tones (p. 419), which, according to him, suggests that their speakers are ‘passionate’ (p. 420). ‘Primitive languages’ were accordingly sung, poetic, and figurative (p. 432). Being tonal and using numeral classifiers (pp. 429–30), Mandarin would be low on Jespersen's scale of evolved languages, though it might be better off than languages that are both tonal and have complex morphological structures. It is of course worse for languages that have no terms such as ‘colour’ for abstract concepts or general categories. Jespersen concludes, among other things: ‘Primitive units must have been more complicated in point of meaning, as well as much longer in point of sound, than those with which we are more familiar’ (p. 425). As pointed out in Mufwene ( 2008 : ch. 6), it is noteworthy how late race lingered as a factor in accounts of language evolution in linguistics.

In contrast, Morris Swadesh's arguments are grounded in the then state of the art concerning phonetic and morphological properties of several languages around the world, as well as in paleontological and archaeological evidence. The examination of these led him to draw (among others) the following conclusion, which anticipated Mufwene's 2010b comparison of the pace of the evolution of language with that of computers, in shorter and shorter intervals of time as we near the present: ‘It seems probable that language developed in the same general lines as other aspects of human culture: very slowly at first and gradually faster and faster’ (Swadesh 2006 : 45).

However, like many others before him, Swadesh hypothesized that language started with naming. The words may originally have been imitative of sounds heard in nature; then they were allegedly replaced by ‘exclamative’ ones, and later by ‘a purely expressive paradigm and an attention-calling or demonstrative one’ (p. 182). He believed that numerals ‘were among the last to take on their present character’ (p. 183). His world-wide comparison of demonstrative forms led him to the conclusion that ‘before the neoglottic period, perhaps in the paleoglottic, fewer phonemes were differentiated than in contemporary languages’ (p. 199), suggesting that even the phonetic inventories of modern languages must have evolved gradually, not becoming fully modern until as late at the emergence of agriculture.

Philip Lieberman ( 2002 ) believed phonetic language to have emerged earlier with the late Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens . Although this position has been revised (see below), the most relevant point here is that different parts of language appear to have evolved incrementally and no particular module seems to have emerged abruptly. It does not appear likely that Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens waited until a complete phonetic inventory was in place before producing their first words, or waited until there was a complete vocabulary with identifiable morphemes before producing phrases and sentences. Although ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, child language acquisition discourages us from speculating about the phylogenetic emergence of language in strictly linear terms. Then, as now, early lexical and phonetic developments must have proceeded concurrently. One may also speculate that the expansion of the lexicon drove the elaboration of a wider phonetic inventory, as this enables more lexical distinctions.

In the style of evolutionary biology, Swadesh proposes a monogenesis account which assumes inter-individual variation in the ‘vocal behavior’ of the relevant hominins: ‘in addition to individual differences, there could have been variations by sub-species and by locality, but all within essentially ‘one language’’ (1971 [2006 edn: 213]). Putatively, hominin populations equipped with similar anatomical and mental structures, living in different localities, and having developed comparable communities in which they experienced similar pressures to interact explicitly, would have developed comparable but non-identical means of communication. This sounds quite plausible, as East Africa, where most of the hominin fossils have been found, is a vast geographical area; to date no paleontological evidence suggests that an early Homo habilis or Homo erectus population dispersed out of one single locality to the rest of the world.

As argued in Mufwene ( 2008 , 2010b ), different individuals endowed with the same capacity for language need not have innovated exactly the same strategies for the same communicative needs. 6 Locally and regionally, there must have been plenty of variation, as argued by Johann Gottfried Herder, which set the innovators' productions up for competition among their imitators. This would have set things up for variational evolution, through competition and selection among available alternatives even within the same language, as members of the relevant populations converged toward their respective norms. Dor and Jablonka ( 2010 : 138) call this normalization process ‘canalization.’

Swadesh assumed that in the earliest, longest stages of the emergence of language, communication among hominins remained instinctive and did not vary significantly from one locality to another; therefore it is normal to assume that our hominin ancestors spoke the same language. According to him, significant diversity started to emerge about ‘half a million or so years ago,’ when the earliest forms of phonetic and symbolic communication, which he calls ‘formal language,’ started to emerge ( 2006 : 214–15). The estimated period is consistent with that proposed by Corballis ( 2002 ) and Lieberman ( 2002 ), though they now think otherwise (see below). This is a stage when Swadesh believes it was possible for different individuals to innovate different linguistic forms for the same denotata and presumably different structures for the same propositions. (Which is reminiscent of Herder's account of the origin of synonyms in various languages.)

Swadesh's hypothesis raises the question of whether his monogenesis position is not really polygenesis; it leaves open the possibility that two late Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens populations developed languages that were not structurally identical and/or mutually intelligible. As is obvious from Bickerton's ( 1990 ) hypothesis of the protolanguage from which ‘true language’ putatively evolved, all may depend on what particular stage in the evolution of the Homo genus and what particular phase of its vocal communication one decides to identify as the beginnings of modern language. This entails particular assumptions about the size of the phonetic inventory and the nature of grammar, which are captured eloquently by Ray Jackendoff's 2010 title ‘Your Theory of Language Evolution Depends on Your Theory of Language.’

Swadesh is also one of the very few scholars who have considered the implications of population movements for language evolution. As the migrants' languages come into contact, often coexisting in competition with each other for the same communicative functions within the same larger population, some may drive others to extinction. Typically, the prevailing language undergoes structural changes and can even speciate into separate languages. Seldom have linguists who are concerned with language endangerment and loss today cast the subject matter from this perspective, which Mufwene ( 2001 , 2008 ) articulates in his ecological approach. The contact-based approach to language birth, endangerment, and death makes language evolution more similar to biological evolution, especially regarding the consequences of language practice under differing ecological pressures. The relevant ecology includes not only the mental and anatomical structures of hominins and humans but also the socioeconomic conditions that determine their population structures and their particular interactional dynamics. Indeed, the latter also trigger migrations, which history has shown to affect both the vitality and structures of languages.

1.3 Recent Developments

As a research topic, the evolution of language has expanded into a productive and stimulating, though diverse, area of scholarship since the 1990s. The scholarship has also expanded beyond the origins of language to include language birth and death, as well as language speciation. While philosophers and philologists no longer appear to deal with it, linguists can hardly claim it as a private domain. No insightful or informative linguistics publication on the subject matter is based exclusively on linguistic data. Interestingly, this is also an area where generative syntax, which has claimed centre stage since the late 1950s, has probably been unable to prevail over other areas, especially since the notion of Universal Grammar (UG), or ‘biological endowment for language,’ or ‘language organ’ (Chomsky 1986 , Anderson and Lightfoot 2002 ), or ‘bioprogram’ (Bickerton 1981 ) is still a black box whose contents have not been articulated in sufficient detail and whose capacity to account for how language works and/or is learned has increasingly been disputed (see below).

Noam Chomsky's occasional contributions to the discourse (e.g. Hauser et al. 2002 , Chomsky 2010 ) have aroused controversy, primarily for not considering much of the non-linguistic evidence and for ignoring objections to his claim that recursion is the most important characteristic of the capacity for language that is not shared by other animals. Others have objected that recursion distinguishes human languages from other animals' means of communication only to a degree. For instance, Margoliash and Nusbaum ( 2009 ) argue that some form of it occurs in some bird songs. Moreover, it may be a general cognitive, problem-solving strategy, as it is attested outside language, such as in mathematics and musical scores, unless the latter domains are claimed to be consequences of language. According to Lieberman ( 2006 : 4–5; 2010 : 164), it can be identified in dancing too. In addition, some scholars argue that there is little, perhaps nothing, in the structure of the human brain that exists only for language and is not part of the general learning adaptation. Language has also increasingly been interpreted as the gradual cumulation of exaptations of particular mental capacities and anatomical organs for communication (Hurford 2006 , Oudeyer 2006 ).

Chomsky's ( 2010 : 51) stipulation ‘The study of the evolution of language is specifically concerned about UG and its origins’ is questionable. An important reason why several scholars have raised issues with it has to do with whether language boils down to UG only, to the exclusion of the physical architecture of language(s). Chomsky's usual equivocations with the disjunctive phrase ‘mind/brain’ has not been informative about the nature of UG. Neurolinguistics has revealed that there is no particular part of the brain that can be identified as the ‘language organ.’ The fact that the parts of the brain implicated in language are not only situated in different regions but also associated with domains other than human communication precludes the possibility of a discontinuous modular language organ. The fact that UG appears to be mental, a property of the mind rather than of the brain as physical matter, clearly leaves open the possibility that it is a (by)product of something else in the many brain activities, including its capacity to produce language. Anderson and Lightfoot ( 2002 ) do not address these issues, although the book is specifically on this topic. Taking the notion for granted, they decide to define it ‘in functional rather than in anatomical terms,’ as it is ‘not localized in the manner of the kidney’ (p. xiii). As a matter of fact, they sometimes identify language itself, like the ‘knowledge of language,’ as the language organ (e.g. p. 8). 7

One must also note an important difference between, on the one hand, how ‘modularity’ is invoked here in reference to concurrent engagements of different parts of the brain during the production of utterances and, on the other, the way the concept is used in technology to characterize the way different parts of a complex machine just complement each other. While complementarity is also true in the case of language, it is not evident that the brain parts are specialized for language only. For instance, Broca's area plays a central part in coordinating sensorimotor activities that have nothing to do with language. Mirror neurons, which have been invoked recently as playing a role in the reproduction of sounds, also play an important part in the reproduction of other physical activities and have been identified in other primates. The lateralization of the brain is not exclusively associated with language either. According to Lieberman ( 2010 : 171), the FOXP2 gene, which was initially too hurriedly associated with language alone, also appears to facilitate ‘learning and precise motor control in human and other species.’

If UG contains no properties that are unique to language, then we are perhaps back to the interest of Condillac and other eighteenth-century philosophers in the evolution of language as a way of learning about the evolution of mankind and their mind. Thus some linguists such as Jackendoff ( 2010 ) justifiably object to focusing on a questionable notion of faculty of language , especially ‘in the narrow sense’ (Hauser et al. 2002 ). It impedes investigating the evolution of language in relation to that of, say, human cognition in general and animal communication.

Several scholars appear to align themselves with Pinker and Bloom's ( 1990 ) position that an all-purpose mental capacity, or various phases of its development, at a particular stage (or stages) of the Homo phylogeny, would have sufficed to produce language. 8 Assuming that what emerged are individual languages but not Language per se (a position consistent with Saussure's ‘la parole […] est nécessaire pour qu'une langue s'établisse’, 1962 [1916]: 37), an alternative interpretation of UG is that it is the common denominator of the properties and architectures of the different languages. Thus, UG may not be a particular mental infrastructure that emerged at some particular phylogenetic stage of the Homo genus and enabled or facilitated the emergence of language, but simply a consequence of this evolution (MacNeilage 2008 : 298).

Subscribing to the distinction between I-language and E-language, Chomsky correctly dismisses the hypothesis that language emerged in the form of ‘language of thought’ (LOT), citing lack of linguistic evidence and the fact that ‘we have almost no idea what LOT would be’ (2010: 226, n. 24). However, he associates language diversification with the externalization of language. According to him, the reason why there are so many languages ‘might be that the problem of externalization can be solved in many different and independent ways, either before or after the dispersal of the original population [out of Africa]’ (p. 61).

Consistent with some remarks in § 1.2 , one may want to justify this position by invoking the Cartesian view that the mind is the same in all members of Homo sapiens sapiens and would work the same way (allowing a limited number of alternatives) in speaking or signing. However, this position does not entail that they must of necessity be endowed with a language-specific UG in order to accomplish this. We just do not know yet. A general-purpose problem-solving cognitive capacity can lead to the same results, if interactants develop similar technologies for communication. UG could amount to common properties of these technologies, i.e. languages of particular communities, properties that are tantamount to universals of language and typological variation on particular parameters. Alternatively conceived of as a body of constraints on the architecture of language, UG can boil down to specifications of what the general-purpose problem-solving cognitive capacity permits and does not permit, bearing in mind that some of the constraints may simply be consequences of the materials used in the technology.

Chomsky too speculates that the externalization ‘might have been a process of problem-solving using existing cognitive capacities’ (2010: 61). This appealing position need not be wedded to his assumption of UG. Those who believe that modern language emerged to facilitate communication among humans can ask why I-language, associated with UG, need be considered anterior to E-language; it may also be conceived of as patterns emerging from successful utterances, as suggested in Construction Grammar or by Complexity Theory. In other words, ‘knowledge of language’ may be considered as internalization of what the communicator can(not) do vocally and/or with manual signs in his/her attempts to express meaning, i.e. a mental representation of the technology developed by a particular population for communication. As hypothesized by Saussure (cited above), the internalization may be considered as a consequence of practice.

Chomsky also argues that only I-language should be in the domain of investigations on the evolution of language. In his own words, ‘any approach to the evolution of language that focuses on communication, the SM [sensory–motor interface] system, or statistical properties of spoken language, and the like may well be seriously misguided’ (2010: 61). This position raises the issue of whether in some cases students of the evolution of language should not start by agreeing on the particular conception of language they are assuming. This is especially important because Chomsky's reaction to the question of ‘why languages appear to vary so widely’ is that this phenomenon ‘is an illusion, much like the apparent limitless variety of organisms’ (p. 62). He is of course driven to this remark by his strong minimalist theory, which appears to treat typological variation as a linguistic epiphenomenon less important than the core of language putatively determined by UG.

Could language really have originated as an abstract and uniform UG, thanks to the brain-rewiring event Chomsky hypothesizes? Or, as surmised above, is UG only the consequence of similarities among the ways members of the Homo genus have gradually solved their communicative problems? As remarked above, this evolution would have been enabled by the same general-purpose mental capacity that evolved gradually in them, and would have led them to coopt their anatomical structures to produce the relevant technology for communication, but not necessarily in identical ways.

It is certainly necessary to agree on a particular definition of language, so that we may determine whether or not we seek to explain the same subject matter. As pointed out in Mufwene ( 2001 , 2008 ), the Saussurean conception of language as ‘system,’ which still prevails in linguistics, is at odds with the folk notion of language as the particular way a population speaks. In fact, lay people speak of languages, not Language (which is a philosophical concept); for them a language is just a way of speaking. It is not evident that the earliest speculations about the origins of human communication were not about languages but about Language, hence the long-held belief among some that Hebrew was the original language.

A problem in linguistics about what is language also arises from the status of phonetics. It is not obvious that linguists agree on whether it is part of language proper or is just a modality, as suggested, for instance, by Hombert and Lenclud (in press). This is a legitimate question, as some like to focus on rules and constraints seemingly ignoring the fact that these apply to physical items called words, which couple meanings (abstract entities) with forms. The architecture of language is built on them. It is hard to imagine that any grammar at the UG level or at the specific-language level, say I-language, could exist without physical entities that it applies to.

The above considerations make it natural to investigate how typological diversity emerged between languages and sometimes within individual languages. The diversity regards, among other things, the specific phonetic inventories that different populations of speakers have chosen and whether or not they made tones phonemic. It also has to do with whether they chose agglutination, polysynthesis, inflections, or isolating morphosyntax to code information around the main verb, whether the verb comes second or in another position in the sentence, whether they use Nominative/Accusative or Ergative/Absolutive syntax to code agency, what strategies they use to specify and track reference (for instance, do they use noun classifiers or genders?), how they articulate tense distinctions, etc. (See Hurford 2008 for a complementary discussion.)

Although syntax has long been privileged in formal linguistics, it has by no means claimed centre stage in the scholarship on the evolution of language, despite all of Bickerton's ( 1990 ) claims about the nature of his phylogenetic protolanguage. Very little has been written, for instance, about the evolution of combinations of words, constraints on the positions of particular constituents within larger units, and movements of constituents to particular positions in sentences. If Chomsky is correct in claiming that typological variation is an illusion, then something should be said about how the common aspects of these syntactic phenomena evolved.

The above question may be more difficult to answer than that of why delimiters such as tense , aspect , and mood for the verb as well as number and class for the noun evolved in language. One can surmise that for communication to be more precise, or less vague, events and conditions must be situated in time and reported differently according to whether they are facts or not, and whether the referents of nouns must be specified according to cognitive requirements that interest particular populations. It must be equally informative to find out why, for instance, the verbal complements of volitional verbs in inflectional languages are more likely to be used in the subjunctive or infinitive. Are the constraints purely linguistic or cognitive?

An answer to the question of why predication emerged, one that Herder considered to be central to the study of the evolution of language, can also be attempted here. We can resort to the way the distinction between Topic / Subject and Predicate has been traditionally explained in grammars, viz. what the utterance is about (the topic ) and what state of affairs ( activity or state ) is associated with the topic. However, much more is involved in predication than just having a head of the predicate phrase. The evolution of the organization of an utterance into Topic / Subject + Predicate   Phrase for most languages needs some explanation, as much as the ways in which materials are structured into the predicate phrase. Would a UG-based account be satisfactory? Or would it be more informative to invoke general-purpose problem-solving cognitive capacity to explain how different populations developed their communicative technologies which nonetheless share similar principles? We probably need considerations not exclusively grounded in linguistic theory to answer this question.

As pointed out by Jackendoff ( 2010 : 69), an important problem with ‘syntactocentrism’ is that is does not account for ‘the evolutionary source of the lexicon.’ Questioning the centrality of syntax in generative grammar, Bolinger ( 1973 ) had argued, along with generative semanticists, that syntax was a consequence of the lexicon, being a body of generalizations from the ways that individual lexical items behave in utterances. It captures morphosyntactic similarities that lexical items display among themselves. Jackendoff ( 2010 : 70) is also right on the mark in pointing out that Chomsky's approach makes it hard to explain how lexical categories (and presumably the ensuing syntactic categories) emerged. Were they arbitrarily predetermined? Why do they not all occur in all languages or in identical ways? Is it also an illusion that some languages have articles while others do not, or that inflectionless languages may not have a finite/nonfinite distinction for the verb, or that the infinitive may not have an identical syntactic status from one language to another?

Ideologically germane to Chomsky's reliance on UG but drawing very different conclusions is Derek Bickerton's work since his book Language and Species (1990). Bickerton started with the claim that modern human language evolved almost abruptly from a ‘protolanguage’ used by our hominin ancestors up to Homo erectus . The protolanguage putatively consisted of a (limited) vocabulary without much grammar, and may have combined both words and gestures. 9 The protolanguage ‘is not a true language, but it's made up of languagelike elements’ (2010: 40). Its users produced ‘short and shapeless and disconnected utterances,’ as one may encounter in especially child language and incipient pidgins, which he considers to be its modern fossils (p. 40). They lack the kinds of syntactic rules and constraints one finds in a ‘true language.’

Like Slobin ( 2002 ), Mufwene ( 2008 , 2010b ) argues against this characterization of particularly pidgins and child language, products of humans endowed with Homo sapiens sapiens 's mind. Moreover, one must be cautious; the human child is not creating a language but learning the language of its social environment. The producers of a pidgin did not start from the absence of a language. Nor did their minds regress to the state of Homo erectus 's mind when faced with the challenge of communicating with another population in a language other than their own and without sufficient exposure to the target language. If anything, pidgins tell the extent to which a modern language can be reduced without losing the status of a language, therefore what are the most central/essential architectural materials a language cannot do without. Assuming that language has evolved gradually, they also tell us what in the architecture of language is so deeply entrenched that it cannot be dispensed with (Wimsatt 2000 ). Gradual emergence assumes a lot of scaffolding (Wimsatt and Griesemer 2007 ), a position quite implicit in grammaticization hypotheses, in which later developments are built on earlier ones. That order of evolution would more or less determine what can be dispensed with, in a less costly manner, if the system must be reduced to an earlier functional modern stage. We also learn that the architectural complexity of a language can be correlated with the communicative needs of its creators/users, not necessarily with the complexity or sophistication of their mental structure. Pidgins are by-products of contact settings where communication was minimal and sporadic (Mufwene 2008 ).

Bickerton also hypothesizes that language must have started with labels that were iconic. Symbolic communication would evolve later, making human language more different from animal means of communication. It's not clear whether symbolic items were already present in the putative protolanguage or whether they emerged in ‘true language.’ I am not sure that his quoting Terrence Deacon's assumption that ‘symbolism’ emerged ‘probably not until Homo erectus ’ (Bickerton 2010 : 50) answers the question, though he concedes to Deacon ( 1997 ) that symbolism, rather than syntax, is what distinguishes humans from animals (Bickerton 2010 : 49). Symbolism enabled what Hockett ( 1959 ) identified as ‘displacement,’ the ability to talk about entities and states of affairs that are not in the hic et nunc of interactions, and thus the ability to talk also about the past and the future, as much as about fictional scenarios. All human populations have developed the capacity to narrate stories and even construct myths of all kinds thanks to the world-creating power of language. This is not possible in animal communication, even after they have been taught to communicate with humans. The reason appears to lie not so much in our invention of symbolic language as in our being endowed with the mental capacity that enabled us not only to produce it but also to do more with it.

On the other hand, Bickerton appears to contradict himself in some ways, when he elaborates on the architecture of his ‘protolanguage’:

[T]he words of protolanguage, even if vocal, could not have been divided into component parts [i.e. sounds], and would likely sound to us like meaningless grunts or squawks. But, like today's words, each would have a fairly well-defined range of meaning, and that meaning, rather than relating directly to the current situation, would refer to some relatively stable class of objects or events, regardless of whether or not these were present at the scene. (2010: 66)

This sounds very much like symbolic communication minus phonetics and syntax. Except for symbolism, protolanguage would be a more elaborate version of primates' calls and gestures, raising the question of why Bickerton compared it to child language and incipient pidgins, which have human linguistic properties. These varieties have basic syntax, variable as it may be in the case of pidgins. In addition, it is not clear how consistent he is with the concession he makes to Deacon. If the latter version is right, reference would have started before ‘true language’ emerged, though ‘true language’ would refine reference by the addition of specifiers such as demonstratives and articles, as well as possessive constructions. The question of when such strategies developed is as worth investigating as that of when parts of speech emerged, and what the emergence entailed regarding the complexification of the architecture of grammar.

One of Bickerton's most problematic positions is his claim, like Condillac's, that language emerged to enhance human capacity for thought. In addition to Chomsky's ( 2010 ) observation that ‘we have almost no idea what LOT would be’ (p. 226, n. 24), we must ask why anybody would need a language of thought that would slow down their thinking process with the constraints of linearity? What is so more efficient about conceptual categories that are labelled linguistically when they can be identified nonlinguistically, as is often obvious when speakers do not have words for ideas they want to express? Granted, human languages have a world-creating capacity; but isn't language more for sharing conceptualizations across speakers rather than for conceiving the scenarios that are shared?

In a different vein, some linguists such as Croft ( 2000 ), Wang and Minett ( 2005 ), Mufwene ( 2008 , 2010b ), Beckner et al. ( 2009 ), and Lee et al. ( 2009 ) also now conceive of languages as complex adaptive systems, which presuppose no permanent sets of rules that guide linguistic behaviour. Instead, linguistic rules are interpreted as emergent patterns produced by self-organization, in a way similar to other natural phenomena involving complexity. This position does not remove from mankind its agency in the emergence of language; it simply means that, throughout the Homo genus phylogeny, the individual acts of solving communicative problems did not include anticipation or a plan to develop what Antoine Meillet identified as a ‘système où tout se tient’. The interactants never had/have any foresight of what their communicative ‘system’ will be like in the future or once it is presumably completed. The focus is always on the hic et nunc ecological pressures for adequate or successful communication.

Patterns, which linguists have identified as ‘rules,’ are therefore consequences of habits that the interactants have developed, based largely on analogies that obtained among items (Mufwene 2008 ), as when, in English, verbs of intention combine with verbal complements in the subjunctive or the infinitive but verbs of prohibition (such as prevent and discourage ) combine with verbal complements in the gerund, sometimes preceded by the preposition from . Because there are cross-linguistic similarities across languages, though the patterns are not identical, it is interesting in terms of evolution to understand why such variation is the case. 10 Thus, are there any particular cognitive pressures that impose on speakers only the typological options that have been attested in human languages but not others? Why would such a mood as the subjunctive , as opposed to the indicative , have emerged, even if it is not universal? Why didn't some other kinds of strategies develop for complements of verbs of intention and prohibition?

Would such constraints provide evidence for Charles Darwin's hypothesis that mental evolution drove the evolution of language rather than the other way around? This kind of question has generally not been addressed, though it arises as an issue from Bickerton ( 1995 ). He could not address it, because he assumes that language emerged to enhance human capacity for thought; therefore the conceptual infrastructure could not possibly influence how language would evolve. Is there any hope that cognitive grammar, functional grammar, construction grammar, or any other approach to syntax that does not rely overly on what Lieberman ( 2006 : 61) calls ‘theories of data’ may help us address the question adequately? Or are the approaches that assume that language is primarily a means of communication misguided? In any case, emergence is antithetic to design. If the claim that language emerged out of hominins' attempts to communicate at various stages of their evolution is correct, then it may be misguided to continue using Hockett's ( 1959 ) term/concept ‘design features.’

Much of the current scholarship on the evolution of language has been more global, focusing on the correlation between, on the one hand, the different stages of the evolution of the mental and anatomical structures of the Homo genus and, on the other, the apparently gradual emergence of language, especially since Homo habilis . These include but are not limited to Bickerton ( 1990 , 1995 , 2007 , 2010 ), Lieberman ( 1984 , 2002 , 2006 , 2010 ), Corballis ( 2002 , 2010 ), MacWhinney ( 2002 ), Fitch ( 2002 , 2010 ), Tomasello ( 2008 ), Tomasello et al. ( 2005 ), McNeill ( 2005 ), McNeill et al. ( 2008 ), MacNeilage ( 2008 ), Mufwene ( 2008 , 2010b ), and Hombert and Lenclud (in press). All but Bickerton argue for gradual, protracted evolution. Tomasello stresses the significance of ecological pressures exerted on hominins by their increasingly more complex social lives, which required management by means of efficient and explicit communication. Modern language would provide this, driven by the same mind that was ready to handle the corresponding complex social interactions. He argues that cooperation and joint attention played as important a role in the emergence of language as in social organization. He shares with Sperber and Wilson ( 2002 ) (see also Sperber and Origi 2010 ) the ‘theory of mind,’ which enables interactants to second-guess each other and thus to infer the intended meaning. All these factors enabled the emergence of symbolic language, the characteristic that indeed led Deacon ( 1997 ) to identify mankind as the ‘symbolic species.’ As noted above, symbolic communication is, according to the latter, the characteristic that clearly distinguishes human communication from animal communication. Sperber and Origi ( 2010 : 131) conclude:

From a pragmatic perspective, it is quite clear that the language faculty and human languages, with their richness and flaws, are only adaptive in a species that is already capable of naïve psychology [i.e. mind-reading ability] and inferential communication.

Corballis, MacWhinney, and McNeill also argue that the earliest ancestors of human language could not have been vocal. Whereas Corballis and MacWhinney originally estimated that the embryonic forms of speech may have started as early as 500,000 years ago, Corballis ( 2010 : 115–16, 119, 123) argues that only language, using gestures, may have started that early, with some complex grammar for that matter, and that the contribution of Homo sapiens since about 100,000 years ago was the introduction of speech. This may not have evolved to its modern forms until about 30,000 years ago. To be sure, Corballis does not claim that the switch was abrupt or that no phonetic vocalizations occurred before Homo sapiens . What he means is that gestural communication was dominant and verbal communication did not prevail as the dominant means of communication until Homo sapiens . It still took tens of thousands of years to evolve to modern phonetic norms.

Corballis' new position is echoed by Lieberman ( 2010 : 175):

McCarthy, Strait, Yates and Lieberman (forthcoming) found that the necks of the Middle Paleolithic fossils who lived about 100,000 years ago were too short to have a pharyngeal SVTv [vertical supralaryngeal vocal tract] that was equal in length to SVTh [horizontal SVT]. A similar constraint rules out Neanderthals having a human SVT. Surprisingly, neck lengths that would support a fully human SVT are not apparent in the fossil record until the Upper Paleolithic, some 50,000 years ago, when a blossoming of complex tools and art appears in the archeological record […] the sudden appearance of an array of advanced artifacts has been taken to be a sign of cognitive advance. […] The presence of a human SVT in a fossil hominid can be regarded as an index for the reiterative neural substrate that makes voluntary speech possible. And that neural substrate also plays a critical role in making syntax, cognitive flexibility, and, yes, dancing possible. Speech, language, and some degree of cognitive flexibility surely were present earlier, but the presence of a SVT specialized for speech at the cost of choking places a date stamp on when brains like ours definitely existed [and presumably on when, or after which, modern languages did too]. 11

McNeill's work certainly indicates that speech has not become the exclusive means of communication to date, as it is usually complemented or supplemented by gestures. Kegl et al. ( 1999 , on Nicaraguan Sign Language), Goldin-Meadow ( 2003b , on home sign language), and the rest of the literature on sign language (see Woll, Ch. 4 below) suggest also that mankind could have evolved to become predominantly signers rather than speakers. 12 It appears to me that biology-style natural selection did drive the evolution of language conceived of as the cumulative manufacture of particular communicative technology under specific ecological pressures that favoured speech as its medium. Givón ( 1998 , 2002 ) cites advantages such as the ability to work and communicate at the same time and the ability to communicate in the dark or in spite of barriers to vision. MacNeilage ( 2008 ) and Allan ( 2010a : 233) also invoke the broadcast capacity of speech, a factor that, according to Dunbar ( 1996 ), fostered the emergence of speech, as it enables the speaker to ‘groom’ (interpreted here charitably in the sense of ‘socialize with’) several rather than one other person at a time. 13 Broadcasting certainly widens the radius of message transmission. Corballis ( 2010 : 122) and Mufwene ( 2010b : 305) invoke, in addition, the fact that speaking uses less energy, as it depends on compact articulators that move in a much smaller space and proceeds faster. To be sure, signing compensates for this in not being absolutely linear, though the signer's hands probably cannot keep up with the speed of a normal speaker's speech organs.

These considerations are nonetheless not the full story. Signing has its advantages too. As John W. Wenzel (p.c., 24 Jan. 2009) pointed out to me, signing is useful when silence is required, such as during group hunting, or in situations where speaking would place the speaker in danger (such as before a carnivorous predator), or when one is diving. It looks as though our hominin ancestors would have weighed the pros and cons of speech vs signing as the primary technology for communication. All these dangerous situations are not part of humans' default mode of existence, in safe environments and interacting in dyads or triads rather than in large groups. If Tomasello ( 2008 ) is right about the significance of social life as an ecological pressure on the emergence of language (see also Corballis 2010 : 116), then interactions in situations of no danger must have favoured the advantages that speech offers over signing, though we now know that one can express in signed language anything that can be expressed in spoken language. Interactions in situations of danger might explain why gestures have not been completely eliminated, especially if one factors in their tendency to be iconic.

However, Fitch ( 2010 : 442–5) articulates more explicitly some of the counterarguments developed since Hewes 1996 about this evolution, highlighting more advantages of signing over speech. Auditory attention is freed while signing, and gestures can be more efficient while teaching a partner to make tools (aside from the fact that actions are more often learned by observation and imitation than from somebody else's verbal teaching). Speech may be more energy-efficient, as it depends on articulators that are smaller than those involved in signing. However, as MacNeilage ( 2008 ) points out, the latter is not structured in exactly the same way. So, according to Fitch, there is still no convincing explanation for why speech has prevailed as the demographically dominant medium of human language.

It appears that the study of the evolution of language will be enriched by a better understanding of changing ecologies of the Homo genus, within and outside the species, during its protracted evolution. It will be informative to learn more about the role played by obvious major ecological factors such as its neural, mental, and anatomical structures, the evolving social structure, and all the pressures they exerted on the emergence and evolution of language. It is crucial to identify individuals as the most direct ecology that filters the external ecological pressures, because the structures and vitality of languages are determined not by concerted behaviours of populations but rather by accumulations of individual behaviours, which occur without foresight of consequences but just happen to converge toward certain outcomes. (See also Dor and Jablonka 2010 for a related discussion.) Each communicative act is determined by particular ecological pressures to which the communicator responds in the hic et nunc of the interaction.

Much of the recent scholarship has focused just on the emergence of speech, especially regarding the transition from ape-like holistic vocalizations to phonetic communication, and the relation of this aspect of the evolution of language to that of the relevant neural circuitry and anatomical structure. This is probably also an area that is less abstract than syntax and semantics and easier to speculate on with more paleontological evidence. Space and time constraints force me to focus here on Philip Lieberman, Peter MacNeilage, and Alison Wray, though many others deserve attention.

MacNeilage ( 2008 ) presents perhaps the most extensive discussion to date, which, as noted above, also questions, like Lieberman ( 2006 ), the empirical justification for the notion of UG and its relevance to accounting for the emergence of language. According to him, speech evolved in several steps, starting with the cooption for phonation of organs that had evolved for ingestion. The rhythmic pattern of the relevant organs was subsequently exapted for vocalization in CV syllables, which could be reduplicated as in child language; but reduplication was abandoned for ‘syllabic variegation and (the related) restrictions on VC co-occurrences’ in the production of words, as ‘pressures on speech systems to expand the size of their message sets’ increased (MacNeilage 2008 : 320). Eventually, longer utterances corresponding to sentences would evolve, but MacNeilage does not discuss this particular aspect of the evolution of language. However, he leaves ‘some latitude for different dialects and for individual differences’ to have been part of the emergence process. (He does not specifically tackle the monogenesis/polygenesis issue.) Against the role that UG, he writes:

For language in particular, mirror neurons provide the foundation for a more encompassing embodiment-based neuro-cognitive alternative to UG, one that goes beyond the mechanisms that lie between meaning and sound, considered separately, by including meaning and sound in the same picture, and giving us a better basis for the relationship. The embodiment perspective was primary in my attempt to say how the first words were made. I suggested that the phonetic structure of the first words resulted from the cognitive pairing of an observed action […] with a concept. (p. 326)

To be sure, MacNeilage brings us closer to articulating Wray's ( 2002 ) hypothesis that the Homo genus evolved from holistic vocalizations to phonetic communication. However, it is difficult to link both scholars here, largely because they do not start from the same working assumptions. MacNeilage does not subscribe to Bickerton's protolanguage any more than to UG. A natural bridge between them is Carstairs-McCarthy ( 1999 ), who, not unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argues that Wray-style vocalizations would have been articulated into syllables first and later into the segments that these consist of. This evolution would have resulted in phonetic communication, though, as noted in § 1.2 , it raises the question of whether vowels and consonants arose at the same time, and whether ‘syllabic variegation’ started in the way hypothesized by Rousseau and by MacNeilage (with CV syllables) or initially just with variation in the quality of vowels—which would raise the question of how long the initial polysyllabic words consisting only of vowels could be. In the relevant passage quoted in § 1.2 , Rousseau suggests that the initial vocalizations consisted of vowels only, and consonants were innovated to mark syllabic boundaries. The fact that in all languages around the world the vast majority of syllabic peaks consist of vowels makes these considerations an interesting question for students of the evolution of language.

An informative complement of the above discussion on speech comes from Fitch's ( 2010 : § 8.3 ) summary of the state of the art about the evolution and functions of what linguists call ‘speech organs,’ which, based on the foregoing, are but exaptations of anatomical structure that evolved primarily for breathing and ingestion of food and liquids. Their use for speech is a perfect illustration of exaptation as defined by Gould and Vrba ( 1982 ):

A character, previously shaped by natural selection for a particular function (an adaptation), is coopted for a new use—cooptation. (2) A character whose origin cannot be ascribed to the direct action of natural selection (a nonadaptation), is coopted for a current use—cooptation. (Gould and Vrba, copied from Wikipedia , 1 Mar. 2011)

Fitch starts by noting, ‘Many animals open and close their jaw in the course of a call […] and changes in lip position are almost as common’ (2010: 311). The role of the descent of the larynx in the emergence of speech has been exaggerated, especially also in the interpretation of the feature as uniquely human. It is attested in other animals too, though in many of them the descent is not permanent. Its role in non-humans is to exaggerate size, and humans too exploit this feature: ‘it is really the descent of the tongue root […] that is the critical factor in speech production, rather than the descent of the larynx per se ’ (p. 312). Fitch agrees with Lieberman et al. ( 1972 ) that ‘hominids must have had some form of speech [intended as ‘language’] before the descent of the larynx’ (p. 313)—which does not mean that they had modern language.

Based on Lieberman ( 2006 , 2010 ), discussed above, one must ask when (i.e. at what stage of hominin evolution) the larynx descended. According to Lieberman ( 1984 , 2006 ), this otherwise maladaptive phenomenon (which puts humans at the risk of choking while ingesting) was probably a consequence of the reconfiguration of the basicranial structure after the hominins became bipedal. This says nothing about the phylogenetic time of the emergence of the feature. However, it is informative to know more specifically that the descent of the larynx was a consequence of the descent of the tongue root down the pharynx, pushing the larynx down, as happens now in human infants (Lieberman 2007 : 46). This anatomical feature must have been selected because of the advantages it conferred to the further evolution of speech into its modern form. Fitch concludes:

Not only does the descent of the larynx enlarge our phonetic repertoire, but it does so in a way that enhances speech encoding and decoding […] and it give[s] us the point vowels [/i/, /a/, /u/] that are found in all human languages, particularly the ‘supervowel’ /i/, which plays a central role in the vocal tract normalization. (2010: 315) [ T ] here must be functions of a descended larynx other than increased phonetic versatility […] leaving size exaggeration as the most plausible explanation. (p. 321; Fitch's italics) [T]he primary evolutionary changes required for [modern] spoken language were neural, not changes in vocal anatomy. (p. 362)

This conclusion confirms Darwin's ( 1871 ) position that the mind drove the emergence and evolution of human language, as it enabled hominins at successive stages of their phylogeny (mental and physical) to coopt parts of their anatomy to develop various stages of the language technology. In other words, with the increasing power of their minds, hominins and humans gradually domesticated their anatomies to produce the communicative technologies called languages. I submit again that the mind is really the most important feature that distinguishes mankind from other primates, and certainly other animals, although it does not function identically in all individuals, not any more than their physiologies are identical. Language is after all a collective gradual invention (by emergence).

The implications of this position are worth exploring further, since no two speakers have identical competences in any language they speak and/or sign. This interpretation is consistent with the notion of idiolect , whose features, as noted above, are determined as much by the variation in the interaction histories of speakers/signers (Mufwene 2008 : 120, 126) as by their individual learning capacities as determined by their mental and anatomical singularities (Dor and Jablonka 2010 : 139).

It should be obvious by now that students of the evolution of language do not share identical working assumptions. Nor have they focused on the same research questions. Some have been more interested in the particular interactive dynamics that made it possible for language as a communal phenomenon to emerge. This is especially the case for Croft ( 2000 , 2003b , 2008 ), Tomasello ( 2008 ), Tomasello et al. ( 2005 ), and Mufwene ( 2001 , 2005 ). Croft and Mufwene have patterned their approaches on biological evolution. Assuming an emergentist construction grammar, Croft has assumed that utterances are replicators, which vary across individuals and are in competition , which is explained by Mufwene 2008 as a situation in which the variants are not equally rated by users. The competition is resolved by selection , which can be interpreted as in biology, when a variant prevails over another or others, for any number of reasons in the relevant ecology.

Mufwene has gone as far as to argue that individual languages are the counterparts of viral species, with their organisms being the idiolects of particular speakers/signers. He posits a feature pool in which the variants produced by different speakers/signers are in competition and the machine that runs selection lies in the ecologies in which languages are used. The challenge is to define ecology , which has usually been understood as the social environment, with all the pressures emanating from population structure. I now think that, regarding the evolution of language, the ecology that matters the most lies in the different evolutionary stages of the mental and anatomical structures of the Homo genus. They determine what forms the relevant means of communication could assume.

Where both Croft and Mufwene hope to inspire those focusing on strictly phylogenetic topics and issues is especially the way they invoke innovators and spreaders/copiers (concepts also used by Tomasello 2008 and Tomasello et al. 2005 ) to account for the emergence of new linguistic features, which can, for convenience, be explained roughly here as applying to forms and constructions. As different innovators need not introduce the same features, competition arises, and various ecological factors determine which variants will prevail for which specific functions, there being room for free variation too. Selection is not made consciously, but is the cumulative outcome of choices made at different times by speakers/signers in their utterances. Since most interactions are dyadic or triadic, and since speakers do not normally hold meetings to state which particular variants they prefer, the question arises of how norms emerge. Both linguists have at times invoked the ‘invisible hand’ but have been invoking ‘self-organization’ in their recent works, after familiarizing themselves with complexity theory.

Exaptation has been a recurrent concept in the literature, underscoring the (self-)scaffolding aspect of language evolution. This has been implicit in many of the discussions above, but the term has increased in currency especially regarding the emergence of speech (see Oudeyer 2006 for an extensive discussion.) It is also applicable to the emergence of grammar, especially in the process called ‘grammaticization’ or ‘grammaticalization,’ whereby some verbs or nouns are exapted to be used as function words, such as complementizers or prepositions. Regarding the emergence of grammar itself, the boldest attempt is to be found in Heine and Kuteva ( 2007 ), who, in the footsteps of Herder and Max Müller, claim that the initial language consisted just of nouns and verbs; all the other categories are derivatives from these. They do not explain how, among other aspects of grammar, predication and different strategies for specifying reference and time evolved, or under what particular ecological pressures, though they explain, on the basis of synchronic linguistic evidence, how particular markers may have acquired grammatical meanings.

I will conclude this selective survey of topics addressed in the past two decades on the evolution of language with a brief discussion of the emergence of linguistic diversity. It is particularly significant because universals and typological variation have been central in linguistics since Greenberg's ( 1966 ) landmark publication on the subject. Even the generative linguists' preoccupation with principles and parameters as they are constrained by UG is a consequence of the pioneering work of Greenberg, though UG is not synonymous with language universals. The question is critical especially because most of the literature has assumed or suggested monogenesis; it has typically not mentioned variation in the protolanguage or the earliest ancestor of modern language. As a matter of fact, as noted above, Swadesh (2006 [1971] ) assumed that because the original ancestor of modern language was instinctive, there could not be significant variation in it. Let's thus focus on when speech started to emerge. Here is what Jim Hurford, one of the veteran students of the evolution of language, has to tell us:

Summarizing the factors contributing to linguistic diversity, (1) the fact that languages are learned, rather than coded into the genes, (2) the arbitrariness of the sign, and (3) the prevalence of horizontal transmission allow for great diversity, but this is significantly constrained by (4) biological factors such as memory and processing limitations, which may or may not be specific to the Language domain. (Hurford 2008 : 251).

These factors account more for idiolectal variation, as there is no faithful replication in language learning (Lass 1997 ), than for the emergence of typological variation across languages. If populations can choose to build their languages on different words and only on overlapping phonetic inventories, what should keep them from developing different combination patterns of these units into larger utterances and therefore different grammars? If we interpret phonology as the grammar of sounds and assume that grammars are consequences of the ways units are combined together and structured into larger and larger (hierarchical) units, why should we expect the relevant hominin/human populations at the different stages of the evolution of language to have done exactly the same thing? 14 After all, the paleontological evidence does not suggest that Homo sapiens sapiens dispersed to the world out of one village in Africa; hominin fossils have been found in a vast area of East (and South) Africa. Shouldn't it be normal to assume that, having reached the same stage of mental and anatomical evolution, hominin populations developed languages that were comparable but not identical in their architectures? They did not have to package information in identical ways, no more than they developed identical cultures.

Another dimension of the scholarship on the evolution of language today lies in computer modelling, which I will not discuss here, due to lack of space. The rewards depend largely on the assumptions that underlie the models. When they are empirically grounded, they become important research tools, such as when used by Philip Lieberman and his associates to determine whether the Neanderthal was capable of speaking. When accurately informed and well designed, modelling can help empirical research reformulate some of its questions about a distant past that cannot be recreated. (See e.g. Oudeyer 2006 on self-organization in the emergence of language and Steels 2011 on the emergence of communal norms.)

Last but not least, there is all the research on animal communication, especially intraspecifically among non-human primates and between humans and some great apes. It is expected to inform research on the evolution of language insofar as scholars can identify both behaviours that may have been inherited from our common ancestors millions of years ago and later homologous evolutions from features shared earlier in our common phylogenetic ancestry. Unfortunately, I can do even less justice to this topic here than to those discussed above. Comparisons by Tomasello ( 2008 ) regarding joint attention and cooperation highlight the significant role which these social factors that we do not share with the other primates played in the phylogenetic emergence of human language. Fitch's and Lieberman's comparisons regarding primates' supralaryngeal vocal structures also reveal important differences that rule out the possibility that they would have developed human-like speech even if they were endowed with the same kind of mind as we have. On the other hand, discoveries that non-human primates share with us mirror neurons, the FOXP2 gene, and some of the specialized functions associated with Broca's area suggest that the human mind had a greater role to play in the emergence of language than may have been assumed before, which is precisely why our phylogenetic cousins have not even developed some symbolic-iconic system similar to sign language. Language may be a more cultural phenomenon than some of us have assumed. I submit that language is indeed one of the facets of human culture, and that both linguists and anthropologists may have been misguided in speaking of language and/in culture as if they were opposed to each other on the same plane.

On the other hand, there is a growing literature suggesting that differences between animals and humans are more a matter of degree than dichotomy. Some of the capacities having to do with mirror neurons and mind-reading are very similar, which raises the question of whether human intelligence is not a consequence of the particular ways various parts of the brains and modules of the mind interact.

It has long been assumed that animal means of communication are innate but that of humans are not. However, it has also become evident that a certain amount of learning is involved in, for instance, bird songs (Margoliash 2010 ). Past the critical period, the bird does not develop the right song for its con-specifics! Besides, some birds exposed to alter-specifics' songs acquire it rather than that of their con-specifics. This and other factors raise the question of whether there is such a thing as language or cultural ‘transmission,’ analogous to gene transmission in biology, especially among humans. Unlike transmission, which, in the absence of mutations, guarantees faithful maintenance of inherited traits, learning by inference almost ensures modification of the target features, which is more consistent with language ‘acquisition,’ interpreted as system reconstruction (Mufwene 2001 , 2008 ). Students of cultural evolution, such as Richerson and Boyd ( 2005 ), Mithen ( 2005 ), and Mesoudi et al. ( 2004 ), have kept up impressively with the scholarship on language evolution. We have everything to learn in reading them too.

Some of the more popular studies of animal communication have focused on what can be learned from teaching human language or an artificial system made by humans to primates (e.g. Segerdahl et al. 2005 ). It appears that lexigrams constitute a seriously impoverished system that does not go beyond the telegraphic stage in child language. Although great apes such as Kanzi have been credited with the ability to understand human speech, it is not obvious that they can follow a narrative the way a human child can. This highlights mental differences between non-human primates and us, though differences in mental capacities are also a matter of degree. Nonetheless, it appears that the less than 2 per cent genetic differences between chimpanzees and humans have entailed exponential cultural, and more specifically language-related, differences.

The overall approach has assumed that humans are more evolved than non-human primates, rather than just being different from them. We have not yet accounted for why we cannot learn to communicate the way they do! Answers to this question may equally well inform us about how different our minds really are from theirs or, more accurately, about how communication in all species is jointly constrained by their respective mental and anatomical ecologies. We have discussed culture as if it were peculiar to humans, whereas it can be interpreted as customary ways in which members of a particular population behave and do things. Cultural differences can also inform us about how different social structures have influenced what needs to be communicated and what kinds of systems are needed to convey the relevant pieces of information.

1.4 Conclusions: Older vs Current Approaches to the Evolution of Language

As aptly expressed by Fitch ( 2010 : 389),

regarding language evolution, there are very few new hypotheses under the sun, and current debates can and should pick up where our scholarly predecessors left off. […T]here are real insights in the older literature which remain unappreciated.

Hombert and Lenclud (in press) note likewise that a number of the positions assumed today were already defended by philosophers of the eighteenth century. For instance, the claim that language is what distinguishes mankind the most clearly from the animal kingdom is already evident in Condillac. It is also hard to sharply distinguish eighteenth-century arguments for the emergence of human language out of instinctive cries and gestures from Bickerton's position that the predecessor of his ‘protolanguage’ consisted of holistic vocalizations and gestures. The idea of gradualism in the evolution of language is not new either; and Rousseau had already articulated the significance of social interactions as a prerequisite to the emergence of language. And one can keep on identifying a number of current hypotheses which are hardly different from earlier speculations on the subject.

An important difference between us and those philosophers and philologists before the nineteenth century, and in some cases up to then, is that we no longer assume that our hominin ancestors up to 200,000–100,000 years ago were just like us, except that they were either created by God or just happened to inhabit our planet long before we did, or just were mentally inferior to us. We now approach the subject taking into account what communicative architecture would have been possible at various stages of hominin evolution. We ask: since Homo habilis was anatomically different from Homo erectus , what kind of language would those remote ancestors of ours have been capable of developing even if they were equipped with the same kind of mental capacity as us? The same applies to Homo erectus and archaic Homo sapiens . A similar question arises regarding the complexity of utterances relative to the complexity of the hominin mind and/or social organization. What kinds of ecological pressures did they exercise on the evolution of language? Lieberman ( 1984 ), Bickerton ( 1990 ), Tomasello ( 2008 ), Corballis ( 2002 , 2010 ), MacNeilage ( 2008 ), and Fitch ( 2010 ) are good illustrations of this ecological approach, although they do not draw identical conclusions. 15

Another important difference between us and philosophers and philologists before the nineteenth century is that, better than Socrates in Plato's Cratylus , we are more aware of the speculative nature of our hypotheses in this research area. With few exceptions, scholars have generally been more critical and more cautious, revealing more awareness of the limitations of the state of the art.

Whether or not we acknowledge it, Charles Darwin has also exercised a long-lasting impact on us: most scholars today do not assume that language was God-given (presuming creationists to be in the minority). Even Chomsky's account that UG emerged by some rewiring of the brain is a Darwinian explanation, because Darwin made allowance for mutations, and UG could have emerged only at a particular stage of hominin evolution, quite late. Besides, mutations are probably also the best explanations from all the changes in hominin evolution, with the mutants prevailing and the rest evolving as consequences of those mutations.

We also now think of the architecture of languages as modular. This is an idea that does not appear in the earlier literature. It also frees scholars from having to assume that every component of modern language must have evolved at the same time as the others. Nor do we have to assume that the anatomical and mental structures that were coopted in the apparently gradual emergence of language all evolved at the same time. Even in assuming that the mind domesticated hominin and human anatomy for the production of language, it need not have coopted the different organs concurrently. This is the kind of evolution suggested by the paleontological evidence that experts have adduced, leading both Michael Corballis and Philip Lieberman to now conclude that speech-dominated communication must have emerged more recently, 50,000–30,000 years ago, not 500,000 years ago. This thinking is consistent with Hombert and Lenclud's (in press) conclusion that the capacity for language is a derivative and consequence of hominins'/humans' evolving cognitive capacity.

It is more and more evident that the subject matter of the evolution of language is multifaceted, having to do with the mechanical/architectural aspects of language, with the particular anatomical organs coopted for its production and perception, with the mental aspects of the technology (including the formation of concepts and their combinations into larger chunks), and with the apparently social motivation for producing the technology. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain how modern humans' linguistic communication got where it is now without answering various questions that pertain to these different facets of the subject matter. It is part of understanding how the Homo genus has evolved over the past two or three million years biologically, anatomically, mentally, and socially.

I wrote this chapter while I was a fellow at the Collegium de Lyon, from 15 Sept. 2010 to 15 July 2011. I am very grateful to the Institute and its administrative staff for the financial and logistic support that enabled me to pursue my research on the phylogenetic emergence of language. I am also indebted to Keith Allan, Barbara Davis, Paul Keyser, and Ioana Chitoran for constructive comments on my first draft. I am alone responsible for all the remaining shortcomings.

Hombert and Lenclud (in press) identify another, less well-recalled account also from the book of Genesis. God reportedly told Noah and his children to be fecund and populate the world. Subsequently, the descendants of Sem, Cham, and Japhet spread all over the world and built nations where they spoke different languages. Here one also finds an early, if not the earliest, version of the assumption that every nation must be identified through the language spoken by its population.

Yet one can argue that syntax, also phonology and morphology, are just a consequence of linearity, constrained though it is by other, cognitive or pragmatic factors.

Note that, although the book is titled The Genesis of Grammar , Heine and Kuteva offer no plausible hypothesis of how the overall grammar evolved, beyond the emergence of free grammatical morphemes and a few inflections.

According to Hombert and Lenclud (in press), much of this practice has to do with what the linguists thought was the subject matter of their discipline. Ferdinand de Saussure was allegedly more interested in languages ( les langues ), which consist of systems, are unified, but are not organic. He was less interested in language ( le langage ), which he putatively considered ‘multiform and heteroclitic’ (as noted above), straddling domains that are ‘physical, physiological, and psychic’ [i.e. mental?].

According to Dor and Jablonka ( 2010 : 139), this variation ‘is inevitable given genetic differences, anatomical differences between brains, differences among ontogenies, and differences of processes of socialization,’ which amount to ‘different developmental trajectories.’ Mufwene ( 2008 ) underestimated the consequences of biological variation across individuals when he invoked ‘different interactional histories’ (pp. 120, 126) in his account of inter-idiolectal variation.

MacNeilage ( 2008 ) doubts that the notion of UG is worth positing at all. He suggests that it is a consequence of language emergence rather than its cause. According to him, ‘ there is currently no validity to the claim that UG has a specific genetic basis ’ (p. 298, MacNeilage's italics).

Hombert and Lenclud (in press) state more specifically: ‘The capacity for language is considered as a derivative capacity and its emergence as the secondary or induced effect of the emergence of a general cognitive competence. It may have followed from the aptitude that only humans would have been endowed with to read and share the other's intentions’ (my translation).

Note that some scholars, including Corballis ( 2010 ) and Lieberman ( 2010 ), now think that modern language may not have originated before 50,000 years ago or so, thus much later than Homo erectus , apparently during Homo sapiens sapiens , and this event may have coincided with the last exodus out of East Africa. (I return to this below.)

Dor and Jablonka ( 2010 : 140) comment on this as follows: ‘as more and more elements came to be canalized, and the language came to assume a certain architectural logic, the logic gradually imposed system constraints on what the next viable innovation would be.’ This underscores Wimsatt and Griesemer's ( 2007 ) idea that current forms and/or structures provide the scaffold for innovations. From the point of view of the evolving system, they refer to this extension of the notion as ‘self-scaffolding.’

[McCarthy, Strait, Yates, and Lieberman (forthcoming) is still being revised as we go to press, and its title is not yet determined.– Editor ] The shift from Corballis' ( 2002 ) and Lieberman's ( 2002 ) early conclusion about when phonetic language emerged underscores the stronger empirical foundations of today's speculations on the evolution of language. New paleontological discoveries and a better understanding to modern humans' neural circuitry will shed more light on the subject matter.

MacNeilage argues against this perspective, citing not only the assumption that the ability to vocalize started before Homo habilis but also ‘the greater organizational similarity between speech and birdsong than between speech and sign language’ (2008: 309).

Bickerton ( 2010 : 28) disputes this account, on the grounds that ‘it fails the ten-word test, what you might call the test of immediate utility.’ To be sure, grooming falls in the category of ecological explanation; it provides actuation for the emergence of language but says nothing about how the emergence occurred. It is undoubtedly one of the many social reasons and is not mutually exclusive with any particular account of how things proceeded, including Bickerton's own account.

A convenient nonlinguistic illustration of this may be found in how engineers using similar algorithms constrained by the same principles produce technologies (such as computers and derivative products) that are not identical in their architectures and functionalities.

As a matter of fact, Bickerton ( 2010 ) now discusses the evolution of language from the point of view of ‘niche construction,’ which Laland ( 2007 : 35) characterizes as ‘the process whereby organisms, through their metabolism, their activities, and their choices, modify [their] niches.’ (See also Odling-Smee et al. 2003 for a more elaborate discussion.) The subtitle of Bickerton ( 2010 ) captures the idea adequately: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans .

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18.16: Chapter 15- The Origins of Language

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This page is a draft and under active development. Please forward any questions, comments, and/or feedback to the ASCCC OERI ( [email protected] ).

• Kenneth A. Koenigshofer
• ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)

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Learning Objectives

• Distinguish between continuity and discontinuity theories of the origins of language; provide examples
• Distinguish between innate and cultural theories of the origins of language; provide examples
• Define polygenism and monogenism
• Define "spandrel" and "exaptation"
• Contrast Chomsky's views with Deacon's views on the origins of language
• Briefly describe the evidence related to whether Neanderthals had spoken language

In this section, we review a number of ideas about the origins of human language. Two prominent approaches are continuity and discontinuity theories. Continuity theorists assume that language evolved gradually from earlier forms of communication in non-human animals and hominids from as recently as 40,000 years ago, according to some theorists, to over 2 million years ago in Homo habilis, according to others. Discontinuity theorists believe that human language is so unique that it must have appeared relatively quickly in human evolution without being derived from any form of animal communication. Some theories propose that language is mostly innate, determined primarily by genes, while others hypothesize that human language has cultural origins, resulting from learning in social interaction, with limited and only general contributions from genetics.

Evolution of Language

From primate origins to a language ready human brain.

The origin of language (spoken, signed, and written) and its relationship to human evolution are complex subjects requiring inferences from the fossil record , archeological evidence, contemporary language similarities and differences, studies of language acquisition , and comparisons between human language and communication in other animals (particularly other primates ).

Language clearly depends upon the human brain having acquired features that made it capable of the production and understanding of vocal symbols. However, how human language and a language-ready brain evolved is not known. Nevertheless, most theorists assume that language must have evolved from earlier, more primitive forms of communication.

One integrative approach to the complex issue of the evolutionary origins of human language and a brain capable of human language comes from "comparative neuroprimatology." This is the study of the brains, behaviors and communication systems of monkeys, apes and humans in order to investigate "the biological and cultural evolution of the human language-ready brain" (Arbib et al., 2018, p. 371). The brains of many animals, including non-human primates, show left lateralization of vocalization in the brain, just as the dominant hemisphere for language in most humans is the left. This suggests a long evolutionary history of human language from earlier forms of vocalization.

Theoretical Approaches to the Origins of Language

Approaches to the origin of language can be sub-divided according to some underlying assumptions (Ulbaek, 1998):

• "Continuity theories" work from the assumption that language exhibits so much complexity that it could not have developed from nothing in its final form; therefore it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among humans' primate ancestors.
• "Discontinuity theories" take the opposite approach—that language is such a unique trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans, and that it must have appeared fairly suddenly during the course of human evolution .
• Innate theories : some theories consider language mostly as an innate faculty—largely genetically encoded.
• Cultural theories : other theories regard language as a mainly cultural system—learned through social interaction.

Continuity Approaches

A majority of linguistic scholars believe continuity-based theories, but they vary in how they hypothesize language development. Among those who consider language as mostly innate, some—notably, Steven Pinker (Pinker & Bloom, 1990)—avoid speculating about specific precursors in nonhuman primates, stressing simply that the language faculty must have evolved in the usual gradual way (Pinker, 1994) as Darwin proposed for most traits. Others in this intellectual camp—notably Ib Ulbæk (1998)—hold that language evolved not from primate communication but from primate cognition, which is significantly more complex.

Those who consider language as learned socially, such as Michael Tomasello , propose that it developed from the cognitively controlled aspects of primate communication, these being mostly gestural as opposed to vocal (Pika & Mitani, 2006; Tomasello, 1996). Regarding the vocal precursors of human language, many continuity theorists hypothesize that language evolved from early human capacities for song (Dunn, et al., 2011; Vaneechoutte, 2014).

Discontinuity Approaches

Noam Chomsky , at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual in the order of 100,000 years ago, installing the language faculty (a hypothetical component of the mind-brain) in "perfect" or "near-perfect" form (Chomsky, 1996). However, it seems unlikely that this would produce adaptive advantage unless a sufficiently large number of others also had similar capacities for communication at the same time.

When Did Language Develop?

Clearly, there are many theories about the origins of language, and the dates cited for its first appearance vary greatly from one author to another. They range from the time of Cro-Magnon man , about 40,000 years ago , to the time of Homo habilis , about 2 million years back .

The hypothesis that language dates as far back as the time of Homo habilis is supported by the resilience of tool cultures in Homo habilis and later hominid species. Tool making techniques (see module on Material Culture) must be passed from generation to generation to be sustained over long spans of time. This can be accomplished by imitation (younger members of the group learning by watching more skillful and experienced tool makers) or by verbal instruction or by a combination of both. Homo habilis "retained their tool cultures despite many climate change cycles at the timescales of centuries to millennia each, [suggesting that Homo habilis and later] species had sufficiently developed language abilities [including grammar] to verbally describe complete procedures" (Model, 2010, p. 7) for toolmaking. Research with non-human primates shows that toolmaking skills based on imitation alone, without verbal instruction, are lost under environmental changes like the changes in climate referred to above. "Chimpanzees, macaques and capuchin monkeys are all known to lose tool techniques under such circumstances" (Model, 2010, p. 7). Many experts content that the resilience of tool culture in Homo habilis supports the view that language existed in these early human ancestors .

Monogenism or Polygenism?

Regardless of how and when language emerged, another question arises immediately: did it do so once, or many times? In other words, do all languages have a common origin, a proto-language that gave rise to all the rest, or did several different dialects emerge, at various places in the world?

Those who argue for the multiple origins, or polygenism , of language, say that the first modern humans did not share the potential for the faculty of speech, and that only after they dispersed through migration did actual languages develop independently among various groups of Homo sapiens .

The proponents of polygenism base their arguments on events and behaviors that would have had little chance of occurring without spoken language, such as great migrations that would have required major planning and organizing efforts. From this premise, the polygenists have deduced, for example, that the peoples who left Africa and arrived in Australia about 60,000 years ago must have spoken a complex language before those who migrated to the Middle East.

The alternative view, the theory of monogenism, proposes that all languages have a common origin, a proto-language at one location that gave rise to language once, and from that original language all the world's languages developed.

Monogenists were greatly influenced by Meritt Ruhlen’s On the Origin of Languages , which posited the existence of a single proto-language over 50,000 years ago. Ruhlen’s work was based, among other things, on analyses of population genetics that showed a high correlation between the genetic diversification of human populations and the diversification of the languages that they spoke. But other studies have shown the the correspondences between genetic classifications of populations and genealogical classifications of languages are more uncertain than was once believed. The fact remains that even though Ruhlen’s work has been questioned on linguistic grounds, many people still endorse the key idea in his book: that all languages had a common origin. Among these proponents of monogenism, there are two major schools of thought. there are two major schools of thought .

Two Major Views within Monogenism

A chance mutation and spandrels.

Following Chomsky (see above), the first major view starts from the premise that the human species as we know it arose from an unlikely genetic mutation that occurred about 100,000 years ago , in which certain of the brain’s circuits were reorganized. This reorganization gave rise to the human “language instinct,” thus paving the way for the explosive growth in all the cognitive abilities that the powerful communication tool of language provides. On this view, language is an innate component of human brain organization, which includes a “universal grammar,” which all humans inherit within their innate brain organization. This universal grammar is therefore a species-specific human trait and is expressed in similarities in the grammars of all languages of the world. This universal grammar organizes and guides language learning regardless of the human language being acquired. This view makes it hard to imagine any intermediate form of language that could function without all the grammatical structures found in languages today.

This discontinuity view of the origins of language has been criticized by some experts as anti-evolutionist, but several renowned scholars of evolution have ideas consistent with the uniqueness of human language and with discontinuity views of its origins. For example, paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, writes that Homo sapiens sapiens “is not simply an improved version of its ancestors—it’s a new [development], qualitatively distinct from them.” For Tattersall and many other scientists, the mechanism that gave rise to language involved the relatively sudden combination of pre-existing elements that had not been selected specifically to produce this attribute but that, together, made it possible. On this view, characteristics evolved for other purposes make a new capability, like language, possible, so that a trait like language itself was at least initially not selected for by natural selection but rather emerged from other evolved capabilities.

This type of evolutionary mechanism is thought to have come into play many times in the course of evolution; the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould calls it exaptation. Exaptation means that a trait, feature, or structure that evolved for one function takes on a different function ; for example, feathers originally evolved to keep ancestral birds warm, but then in later descendants became essential for flight.

Steven Jay Gould calls the features that result from exaptation, such as language, “spandrels. ” In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic , rather than a direct product of adaptive selection . These ideas were brought into biology by Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in a 1979 scientific paper in which they sought to temper the influence of adaptationism , the view that sees most organismal traits as adaptive products of natural selection . Gould and Lewontin argued that chance and other non-selection factors played a larger role in evolution than adaptationists claimed. They believed that many traits were evolved for other purposes become "recruited" to perform other unrelated functions during the course of evolution. These recruited "spandrels" are examples of exaptation.

Like Noam Chomsky, Steven Gould also believed that human language is so different from anything else in the animal kingdom that he did not see how it could have developed from ancestral cries or gestures, but he did imagine its having emerged as a side effect of the explosive growth of human cognitive abilities.

A More Adaptationist View

The second major school of monogenism posits a concept of the evolution of Homo sapiens in which language developed from cognitive faculties that were already well established, and that once it was present in some earlier form, it was then naturally selected for . In this view, the birth of language was triggered not by a random mutation (as the first view states), but simply by the availability of an increasingly powerful cognitive tool. Bit by bit, by natural selection, those groups of hominids who developed an articulate language that let them discuss past and imaginary events would thereby have gradually supplanted those groups that as yet had only a proto-language. The emphasis here on natural selection for language ability makes this approach more of an adaptationist view.

This second school of monogenism is identified with the linguist and psychologist, Steven Pinker , who believes that language may very well have been the target that evolution was "aiming for" (this phrase is not to be taken literally since evolution has no purpose or goal but happens automatically; see Chapter 3; natural selection selected for language ability only in the sense that those who were better at language survived and reproduced more offspring). Pinker argues that the brain has a general capacity for language —a concept often associated with connectionist theory in cognitive science (see module on connectionist networks in the chapter on learning and memory). Pinker invokes the Baldwin effect , for example, as a major evolutionary force that could have led to modern language (see discussion of Baldwin Effect below). The ability to learn language would therefore have become a target of natural selection , thus permitting the selection of language-acquisition devices that were genetically pre-wired into the brain’s circuits.

This theory of monogenism favored by Steven Pinker also implies intermediate forms of language that eventually led to our own. For example, Derek Bickerton , a linguist renowned for his work on the evolution of language, suggests that human language abilities evolved in two stages . In the first , humans would have used a proto-language of symbolic representations that took the concrete form of vocal and/or gestural signs. This stage might have lasted nearly 2 million years. Then, about 50 000 years ago , humans would have developed a more formal syntax that let them exchange ideas with significantly more precision and clarity. With syntax, people could not only label things (“leopard paw print”, “danger”, etc.), but also join several labels together to express even more meaning (“When you see a leopard paw print, watch out!”).

Thus, if symbolic representations , already present in the proto-languages , made the construction of the first mental models of reality possible, it was the emergence of syntax that gave human language the great richness that it has today. To give some idea of how the transition from symbolic representations to syntax may have occurred, Bickerton cites the example of the pidgin languages of the colonial period. These rudimentary languages were developed by people of different cultural origins who needed to communicate. Though the pidgin languages themselves had no grammar at all, when they were learned by a second generation, they became what are known as creoles: new, grammatical languages derived from multiple mother tongues.

Another important scholar of the origins of language, anthropologist Terrence Deacon , takes exception to the primacy of grammar, believing instead that the essential feature of language is its use of symbols . According to Deacon, the so-called symbols that some authors say animals use are actually only indexes. He says that people who try to teach language to chimpanzees always ensure that the things designated by the words or icons being taught are present in the animal’s environment, which makes these words or icons mere indexes. Deacon associates this inferior level of language, based on signs and icons, with that used by children in their earliest years. By contrast, says Deacon, articulate adult language depends on the specificity of the symbols, which in turn depends on the logical connections that each symbol in a language has with the others . For Deacon, it is this network of relationships , far more than the mere occurrence of arbitrary signs, that characterizes the symbols used by human beings.

Deacon therefore thinks that we must try to understand the evolution of language not in terms of innate grammatical functions , but rather in terms of the manipulation of symbols and of relationships among symbols . There is certainly a human predisposition for language, but this predisposition would be the result of the co-evolution of the brain and of language . What is innate, according to Deacon, is a set of mental abilities that give us certain natural tendencies, which are expressed in the same universal language structures. Thus Deacon offers a different concept from Chomsky, who associates the origins of universal grammar with a language-specific innovation in the brain.

Deacon sees this co-evolution of the brain and language as being rooted in the complexity of humans’ social lives , which involved not only a high degree of co-operation between the men and women of a community to acquire resources, but also exclusive monogamous relationships to ensure proper care for very young children who were greatly dependent on adults. This highly explosive mixture is not found in any other species (the great apes, for example, gather their food individually). To ensure the stability of the group, rituals and restrictions were required: in other words, abstractions that could be comprehended only if the individuals involved could understand and use symbols .

Universal Human Language Circuitry

The first changes in the neurons of the left hemisphere that accompanied the development of language faculties during hominization may have occurred about 100,000 years ago, or even earlier. But the truly explosive growth in these faculties most likely began with the evolution of the angular gyrus , about 50,000 years ago (see modules 14.10 and 14.11).

Together, the angular and supramarginal gyri constitute a multimodal associative area that receives auditory, visual, and somatosensory inputs . The neurons in this area are thus very well positioned to process the phonological and semantic aspect of language that enables us to identify and categorize objects. The language areas of the brain are distinct from the circuits responsible for auditory perception of the words we hear or visual perception of the words we read. The auditory cortex lets us recognize sounds, an essential prerequisite for understanding language. The visual cortex , which lets us consciously see the outside world, is also crucial for language, because it enables us to read words and to recognize objects as the first step in identifying them by a name.

Scientists believe that articulate language as we now know it must have already appeared 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, because it was then that the various human ethnic groups became differentiated. But all these groups still retain the ability to learn any language spoken anywhere in the world. Thus a Polish or Chinese immigrant to New York City ends up speaking with a New York accent, and vice versa, which just goes to show that all of us have inherited the same linguistic potential.

A pidgin is a language created spontaneously from a mixture of several languages, so that the people who speak them can communicate. The people who develop a pidgin language agree on a limited vocabulary and employ only a rudimentary grammar. For example, in Franco-Vietnamese pidgin, this results in sentences such as “Moi faim. Moi tasse. Lui aver permission repos. Demain moi retour campagne.” [Me hunger. Me lie down. He have permission rest. Tomorrow me return country.] The first documented pidgin, the Lingua Franca, was used by Mediterranean merchants in the Middle Ages. Another well known pidgin was developed from a mixture of Chinese, English, and Portuguese to facilitate trade in Canton, China during the 18th and 19th centuries. Another classic example is the pidgin developed by slaves in the Caribbean, whose cultural origins were too diverse for their own languages to survive after their forced transplantation. Children who grow up together and learn a pidgin tend to spontaneously impose a lexical structure on it to create a creole: a true language whose vocabulary comes from other languages. But this does not happen with all pidgins, and some are lost or become obsolete. According to researchers such as Derek Bickerton, people who find themselves in the particular circumstances described above revert to an older form of communication, what Bickerton calls a proto-language, of which pidgin would be the modern manifestation.

Baldwin Effect

In 1896, American psychologist James Mark Baldwin proposed an evolutionary mechanism that soon came to be known as the “ Baldwin effect ”. It is a process whereby a behavior that originally had to be learned can eventually become innate , that is, fixed in the genetic programming of the species concerned (Sznajder, et al., 2012). The effectiveness of the learning plays a key role in the Baldwin effect, which distinguishes it from Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. The idea behind the Baldwin effect is that individuals who are able to learn a given kind of behavior more effectively may over the course of their lives acquire advantages that individuals whose brains are less plastic will not. Natural selection will therefore tend to favor those who always learn faster until, at some point in evolution, the behavior will no longer need to be learned at all: it will have become instinctive.

It should be noted that the Baldwin effect assumes that the environment remains relatively stable, because if it changed too much, there would be no selection against plasticity, which would become an important adaptive factor. But if the environment remains stable for a long time, natural selection may favor a mutation that makes the behavior innate and hence more robust and efficient.

The Baldwin effect, as an evolutionary mechanism that targets learning abilities, has been successfully simulated with many computer programs. Many scientists believe that it may have played a decisive role in the evolution of language, nevertheless the existence of the effect is controversial and many evolutionary biologists dismiss the idea (French & Messinger, 1994).

Neanderthal man

It was long believed that Neanderthal man could not communicate verbally—that Neanderthals must have had some primitive form of language, but could not produce the complete range of sounds of human language. According to a hypothesis advanced by American linguist Philip Lieberman, Neanderthals’ larynxes had not yet descended so low as those of Homo sapiens, so they would have had a great deal of difficulty in pronouncing the three main vowels present in the majority of the world’s languages (ee as in “beet”, oo as “boot” and a as in “aha!”).

However, some authors argue that to speak a rudimentary language, one need not master all of the vowels, so long as the language has a sufficient number of consonants.

Moreover, recent research has raised questions about Lieberman’s hypothesis. Many researchers find it hard to believe that Neanderthals, who produced sophisticated tools, adorned their bodies with bracelets and necklaces, buried their dead, and produced works of art, had little or no ability to communicate verbally.

Some authors even believe that the skull on which Lieberman based his work was not truly representative of Neanderthal man. Contrary to his findings, reconstructions of other Neanderthal skulls have shown that their base would have allowed the existence of a vocal tract very similar to that of modern humans. For example, the discovery in 1989 of the 60,000-year-old skull of a male Neanderthal with a hyoid bone (the bone that supports the larynx) even led some researchers to say that he had probably been able to speak.

One thing is certain: Neanderthals disappeared about 28,000 years ago, leaving the Earth to their rivals, Homo sapiens sapiens, who had everything they needed to use an articulate symbolic language with elaborate syntax. We should not discount the possibility that Neanderthals also had developed the ability to speak and that language may have played a significant role in their lives as well.

It is assumed by most theorists that language must have evolved from earlier, more primitive forms of communication such as pre-linguistic systems used by our primate ancestors. Some theorists such as Steve Pinker consider language to be mostly innate. Explosive growth of language capacities in humans, according to some theorists, began about 50,000 years ago with the evolution of the angular gyrus, a multimodal area of cortex. It is speculated that human language must have evolved at least 50,000 to 60,000 years ago when human ethnic groups differentiated yet all retained the ability to learn any human language with ease that they are exposed to in their early experience.

Arbib, M. A., Aboitiz, F., Burkart, J. M., Corballis, M., Coudé, G., Hecht, E., ... & Wilson, B. (2018). The comparative neuroprimatology 2018 (CNP-2018) road map for research on How the Brain Got Language. Interaction Studies , 19 (1-2), 370-387.

Chomsky, N, 1996. Powers and Prospects. Reflections on human nature and the social order . London: Pluto Press, p 30.

Dunn, M.; Greenhill, SJ.; Levinson, SC.; Gray, RD. (May 2011). "Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals". Nature . 473 (7345): 79–82.

French, R. M., & Messinger, A. (1994). Genes, Phenes and the Baldwin Effect: Learning and Evolution in. In Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (Vol. 4, p. 277). MIT Press.

Pika, S. & Mitani, J. (2006). "Referential gestural communication in wild chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes )" . Current Biology . 16 (6): R191–R192. doi : 10.1016/j.cub.2006.02.037 .

Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). "Natural language and natural selection" . Behavioral and Brain Sciences . 13 (4): 707–784. doi : 10.1017/S0140525X00081061 . S2CID 6167614 .

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct . New York: W. Morrow and Co.

Sznajder, B., Sabelis, M. W., & Egas, M. (2012). How adaptive learning affects evolution: reviewing theory on the Baldwin effect. Evolutionary biology , 39 (3), 301-310.

Tomasello, Michael (1996). B M Velichkovskiĭ; Duane M Rumbaugh; Universität Bielefeld Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung (eds.). The cultural roots of language . Communicating meaning : the evolution and development of language . Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum

Ulbæk, I. (1998). James R Hurford; Michael Studdert-Kennedy; Chris Knight (eds.). The origin of language and cognition . Approaches to the evolution of language : social and cognitive base . Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 30–43.

Vaneechoutte, M. (2014). "The Origin of Articulate Language Revisited: The Potential of a Semi-Aquatic Past of Human Ancestors to Explain the Origin of Human Musicality and Articulate Language" (PDF). Human Evolution . 29 : 1–33.

Attributions

Adapted by Kenneth A. Koenigshofer, PhD., from The origins of language by Bruno Dubuc, The Brain from Top to Bottom, under a Copyleft license. Some text also adapted from: Model, E. P. (2010, 2020). Origin of Language; usilacs.org. http://usilacs.org/wp-content/upload...-Wikipedia.pdf ; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; retrieved 4/2/2022.

Scientists Discover a ‘Phonetic Alphabet’ Used by Sperm Whales, Moving One Step Closer to Decoding Their Chatter

Researchers used artificial intelligence to spot patterns in recordings of the marine mammals’ vocalizations, uncovering the “building blocks of whale language”

Daily Correspondent

Sperm whales are highly social creatures that roam the world’s oceans together, diving deep in search of giant squid, their favorite food.

As they swim and hunt, these massive marine mammals communicate by making a series of rapid clicks that sound like a combination of “Morse code and popcorn popping,” writes NPR ’s Lauren Sommer.

Now, with help from artificial intelligence, scientists are starting to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the sperm whale communication system. They found a plethora of sounds they’ve termed a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” raising the possibility that the mammals have their own language, just like humans.

Researchers described their findings Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications .

The new paper is the result of a collaborative research effort called Project CETI , which stands for “Cetacean Translation Initiative.” With the initiative, researchers were curious to know if advancements in machine learning and computing could help make sense of whale vocalizations.

Scientists recorded a clan of 400 sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean between 2005 and 2018, and they estimate at least 60 individuals ended up on the recordings. Using advanced computer algorithms, they detected patterns in the sounds—suggesting sperm whale communication may be more complex than previously assumed.

Sperm whales rattle off a series of rapid-fire clicks that researchers have named “codas.” Each coda consists of between three and 40 clicks. In addition to changing the number of clicks they make in quick succession, whales often speed up or slow down the tempo of each coda—researchers call this “rubato.” Sometimes, they add an extra “click” at the end of a coda, which scientists call “ornamentation.”

In the end, the team identified 156 distinct codas, each with its own rubato, ornamentation, tempo and rhythm. On their own, these codas may simply be meaningless sounds. But when combined, they could add up to something akin to syllables, words or even sentences.

“We’re now starting to find the first building blocks of whale language,” says study co-author David Gruber , a marine biologist and the founder of Project CETI, to the Associated Press ’ Maria Cheng.

Researchers still don’t know what the repertoire of clicks means, if anything. One possibility is that sperm whales are using the clicks as a form of language. But it’s also possible the noises are more like music, which can “have a strong influence on emotions without it actually conveying information,” says Taylor Hersh , a bioacoustician at Oregon State University who was not involved in the research, to the New York Times ’ Carl Zimmer.

Now that they have the sperm whale phonetic alphabet, researchers can proceed with figuring out how its different components fit together—and, possibly, what it all means.

“Once you have this combinatorial basis, it allows you to take a finite set of symbols [and] compose them to create an infinite number of symbols by following a set of rules,” says study lead author Pratyusha Sharma , a computer scientist at MIT, to New Scientist ’s Clare Wilson.

For example, in the future, researchers might be able to match vocalizations with specific behaviors. That may not produce an exact one-to-one translation from whale to human language, but it would be “an amazing achievement” all the same, says Diana Reiss , a psychologist and animal behaviorist at the City University of New York who was not involved in the project, to the Associated Press.

Learning more about how sperm whales communicate may also be important for conservation. Categorized as “ vulnerable ” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, sperm whales are still recovering from commercial hunting by humans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though such whaling has been banned for decades, sperm whales now face new threats, including human-caused climate change, increased ocean noise, collisions with ships and entanglement in fishing gear.

If researchers knew what sperm whales were saying, they might be able to come up with more targeted approaches to protecting them, researchers suggest. In addition, drawing parallels between whales and humans via language might help engage the broader public in conservation efforts.

“When we can talk about whales and how important their grandmothers are , or how important being a good neighbor is, or the importance of cultural diversity in society, that really resonates with people and can drive change in human behavior in order to protect the whales,” study co-author Shane Gero , a biologist at Carleton University in Canada and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, tells NPR.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.

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Stephen T. Schreiber Princeton, N.J.

We are living in a country where democracy is on trial. Yet New York’s restrictions on cameras in the courtroom deprive the public of live video coverage of Donald Trump’s hush money trial.

The public has to rely on details described by reporters, some sequestered in a different room with a video feed, others in the courtroom. Meanwhile, nuances like facial expressions, body language, interactions with legal teams and verbal outbursts are left to courtroom sketches shared with the public through the media.

While juror anonymity must be protected, there should be live audio-visual coverage. Mr. Trump’s trials are more critically important than any other in U.S. history. With a presidential election looming, citizens should be able to witness the courtroom activity through their own lens. It is not just Mr. Trump’s freedom at stake.

Cynthia Gardner Bruml Cleveland

Re “ We Are Talking About the Case Against Trump All Wrong ,” by Rebecca Roiphe (Opinion guest essay, May 5):

Ms. Roiphe’s guest essay reminds me of the Indian parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time and attempt to understand what it is like by touching different parts of its body and then arguing that their one perspective is the one truth.

Ms. Roiphe was an attorney at the D.A.’s office. For her the case is really about business ethics. Let’s say she’s holding an ear. That’s one component, but it’s not the whole story.

The Trump case in New York is also about election interference; let’s call that the tusks. Some say the case is about personal ethics; let’s call that the tail. Dismissing the trunk or the tail just because you are holding an ear does not help anyone.

The moral of the Indian parable is that individual perspectives can be limited. Her essay poses the danger of saying that the Trump case is only about one thing, thereby making it possible to dismiss the whole case as frivolous if you find fault with that one thing. The reality is the whole elephant.

Daniel O’Brien Lafayette, Ind.

Re “ Judge Postpones Start of Documents Trial ” (news article, May 8):

It was no great surprise to learn that the Trump documents trial was “indefinitely” postponed.

The federal judge on the case, Aileen Cannon, has done everything in her power to delay the trial, and possibly prevent it from ever occurring, showing clear bias in favor of the former president.

She should be removed not only from the case, but from the bench as well.

Gary L. Adler Lynbrook, N.Y.

Re “ Democrats Help Johnson Survive Bid to Oust Him ” (front page, May 9):

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s failed attempt to oust Speaker Mike Johnson may appear, on first blush, to be as unhinged as her theory of a wildfire caused by Jewish space lasers, but there is method in her mania.

Ms. Greene, described by a Republican colleague as a “ dumpster fire ,” is a performative politician who is playing to an audience of one: Donald Trump. Her talk of overthrowing the “uniparty” (Democrats and Republicans voting together) is red meat to the MAGA base.

Reasonable people may try earnestly to unhear and unsee Ms. Greene’s theater of the absurd, but she is functioning as Mr. Trump’s attack dog. Do not underestimate her capacity for mischief; she is not going away anytime soon.

Eric Radack Santa Fe, N.M.

Re “ Kennedy Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain ” (news article, May 9):

It took “a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times” to reveal Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s relevant health history. Voters should be less tolerant of the lack of medical disclosures, the failure to disclose tax returns, the sources of dark money funding campaigns and the unwillingness to participate in moderated debates and in-depth media interviews.

Jim Hoffmann Manchester, Mass.

Re “ Are Smartphones Driving Our Teens to Depression? ,” by David Wallace-Wells (Opinion, nytimes.com, May 1):

In questioning the relationship between smartphone use and the ongoing mental health crisis among our young people, Mr. Wallace-Wells ignores the extensive body of research documenting the conditions that contribute to children’s healthy development and well-being — and how social media provides the exact opposite conditions.

There is little debate that childhood trauma can have long-lasting psychological effects. Are we really to believe that repeated exposure to videos of car crashes, photos of dead bodies, memes about rape and posts glorifying eating disorders have had no effect on the mental health of the millions of children who have seen this content in their feeds?

At a time when suicide has become the second leading cause of death for 10- to 14-year-olds in the U.S., the need for urgent action cannot be overstated. While some argue over whether the current data constitutes causality, Big Tech is continuing to infiltrate our children’s brains with addictive algorithms and harmful content, all in the name of boosting profits.

Getting smartphones out of schools and policy safeguards that prevent social media companies from exploiting children are basic but crucial steps we can take to protect our kids and set them up for successful, healthy lives.

Julie Scelfo New York The writer is the founder and executive director of Mothers Against Media Addiction.

It’s not just teens who are negatively affected by smartphones. What about us older folks? It’s hard to keep up with this ever-changing digital world.

Ann Glasser Hamden, Conn.

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: you only cache once: decoder-decoder architectures for language models.

Abstract: We introduce a decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, for large language models, which only caches key-value pairs once. It consists of two components, i.e., a cross-decoder stacked upon a self-decoder. The self-decoder efficiently encodes global key-value (KV) caches that are reused by the cross-decoder via cross-attention. The overall model behaves like a decoder-only Transformer, although YOCO only caches once. The design substantially reduces GPU memory demands, yet retains global attention capability. Additionally, the computation flow enables prefilling to early exit without changing the final output, thereby significantly speeding up the prefill stage. Experimental results demonstrate that YOCO achieves favorable performance compared to Transformer in various settings of scaling up model size and number of training tokens. We also extend YOCO to 1M context length with near-perfect needle retrieval accuracy. The profiling results show that YOCO improves inference memory, prefill latency, and throughput by orders of magnitude across context lengths and model sizes. Code is available at this https URL .

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